Implications of India’s national cyber security policy for the private sector
While the publication of a policy document itself will not readily get us to a secure state, it will definitely push us along in the right direction
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India’s Department of Posts delivers better citizen services with SAP
SAP AG today announced that the Department of Posts (DoP), the government-operated postal system of India, has chosen SAP solutions to strengthen responsiveness and reliability across more than 155,000 post offices.
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10 must know facts about Big Data in India
These 10 big data facts gauge the current state of Big Data in Indian enterprises and explore how Big Data is emerging as both a challenge and opportunity for Indian firms
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TCS completes ALTI acquisition, announces SAP Innovation Center in France
Boost to TCS’ strategic growth plans in Europe with the integration of 1,200 employees across France, Belgium and Switzerland.
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Healthcare pioneer improves quality of healthcare with Big Data
IBM engagement helps Dr Lal PathLabs integrate service and operations to better support its 30,000 daily patients, using Big Data insights to reduce risk while improving turnaround time
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Facebook makes deep inroads in developing countries with Facebook for Every Phone app
The social networking giant recently announced that there are now more than 100 million people using Facebook For Every Phone each month
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Can Big Data help in predicting results of elections in India?
The US elections in 2012 showed how Big Data could be used for turning mountains of campaign data into specific actionable information. Data analyst Nate Silver became a celebrity when he managed to predict the results in each of the 50 states accurately. While this could be achieved in the US, can data driven analysis succeed in predicting results of elections in India too?
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CISO Profile: Ashish Chandra Mishra, Tesco HSC
Ashish Chandra Mishra, CISO, Tesco HSC reveals his personal side and discusses his most challenging security initiatives, strategies he has adopted for countering evolving threats and security projects in pipeline
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Data centers embark on journey of transformation
Once data centers become software-defined, every component of IT infrastructure can be granularly controlled and driven by policies
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Influencing consumer decision making through behavioral sciences and BI
Let’s take a closer look at how modern BI technology can work alongside insights from decision sciences to influence consumer decision making
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Suhas Kelkar, CTO for BMC Software in Asia-Pacific, wins prestigious Zinnov Award for Thought Leadership
The Zinnov Award recognizes his leadership in creating a range of novel incubation processes and the framework he put in place at BMC
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Mobile Network Access Controls can prevent usage of unauthorized devices in the enterprise
Mobile Network Access Controls can provide security offerings at the network layer to complement the security offerings of MDM at the device level
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Microsoft's Bill Gates on the future of technology
Company co-founder Bill Gates says that software is poised to solve the world's problems on an unprecedented scale
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5 tips to ace your internal IT job interview
Think you have an edge over external candidates because you know the company and have powerful references? That line of thinking won't help you land the job
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Mobile developers must focus on tasks, not apps
We need more brevity in mobile app development. Develop for user needs -- and capture the user's task on a cocktail napkin, not a 50-page requirements document
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Micro Focus, ETI partner to provide training in software development and testing solutions
Under the partnership, ETI’s subject matter experts and consultants will provide training services for Micro Focus products
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Trends impacting next-gen data centers
Advent of cloud computing is changing the very definition of how data centers are being looked at, says Sharad Sanghi, CEO, Netmagic Solutions. He takes a detailed look at key trends impacting the future of data centers in India
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Aruba Networks launches 802.11ac solution in India
The solution delivers gigabit Wi-Fi combined with the device density and application intelligence required by today’s Wi-Fi networks
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Cloud era calls for a dynamic software-defined network
The dynamic networking requirements in the cloud era are forcing vendors to focus on software-defined networking, which promises to make networks simpler, cheaper, and more efficient
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Digital bread crumbs: Seven clues to identify who is behind advanced cyber attacks
Every stage of the attack kill chain can leave behind a digital paper trail
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How hiring managers find talent using LinkedIn
LinkedIn's 2013 Global Recruiting Trends survey details how 3,300 hiring managers find talent. Take note as you pursue your next job
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Apollo Munich Health Insurance leverages Microsoft SharePoint to increase customer engagement
The firm has launched a health portal using Microsoft SharePoint that will enable its customers to carry out their health and lifestyle assessments and manage medical reports
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‘Mobile is redefining how ERP is used in supply chain management’
In an interview with InformationWeek, Dr J.J. McChesney, Head of Product, Enterprise Mobility Division, Symphony Teleca Corporation talks about how different industry verticals are integrating mobility solutions with their core enterprise apps to empower business functions within the enterprise
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India ranks second in becoming the leading innovation center for the world, says KPMG
India, The United States and China are the top three countries with the potential to drive technology breakthroughs that will have a global impact in the next four years, says a KPMG survey
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DSCI Best Practices Meet 2013 focused on forward leaning strategies for cyber security
The meet featured discussions on various aspects of cyber security and contemporary challenges and witnessed participation from over 200 industry and government security professionals
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One-third of travel related search queries on Google India coming from mobiles and tablet devices
A study by Google India indicates the growing trend of bookings being completed on mobile devices from mature users
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Does ERP play a role in delivering good customer experience?
While ERP is a clear strategic tool, only 9 percent of leading manufacturers have fully realized the importance of creating a customer-oriented culture and process workflow, says Epicor
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Facebook partners with IAMAI to impart internet safety education to students
The IAMAI and Facebook partnership looks to leverage Facebook’s global learnings with IAMAI’s Safe surfing classroom programs to train teachers, students and parents.
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WordPress, CMS platforms give attackers room for creativity
Hackers use vulns in content management systems to accomplish everything from privilege escalation on servers to using connections to run command and control
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IDFC’s data center journey
Uma Ramani, Senior VP– IT, IDFC takes us through the journey of IDFC data center from its initial days to becoming a Tier III-certified facility
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ITaaS more than just a passing fad
Although the ITaaS model is most suited for SMB enterprises, large size organizations are also increasingly leveraging ITaaS to run a part of their business operations
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Is innovation on the CIO agenda?
Where do CIOs stand in the corporate innovation agenda? Are they leading or participating in the program or are they bystanders?
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Social networking: The ubiquitous starting block for APTs
Many surveys and reports have identified social networking as the primary starting point for APTs. Let’s take a look at five best practices that organizations can follow to prevent information leakage through social networks
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Phone fraud plagues call centers at financial institutions
Social engineers increasingly tap unsuspecting customer service reps for information, Aite Group says
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BlackBerry launches new BlackBerry Q5 Smartphone in India at Rs 24,990
The new BlackBerry Q5 smartphone is expected to be available from authorized retailers in India starting July 20th
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A tribute to Dr. Amar Bose
Founder of Bose Corporation, Dr. Amar G. Bose, passed away last week at the age of 83. And here is a tribute to the man who will be fondly remembered as an inventor and teacher
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5 reasons your employees don't care about business continuity
You’ve built a great BC/DR plan, but you missed one critical fail point -- users. Before disaster strikes, address these five reasons that disaster recovery schemes fall flat
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‘IT networking is one of the fastest growing markets’: A.P. Chen, Chairman, D-Link India
In a discussion with InformationWeek, A.P. Chen, Chairman, D-Link India, talks about the factors contributing to the growth of IT networking. He also talks about the company’s India-specific plans and offers his perspective on India’s immensely talented human resource pool
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How cloud computing can revolutionize manufacturing
Cloud computing can help manufacturing firms adopt the latest technology innovations to improve their processes, supply chain management, research and development, collaboration, and front office and back office functions
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Software asset management - An iceberg called SAM
Software asset management is a hidden devil that is coming out of the shadows to haunt organizations today. Here is a closer look at some of the risks it poses to your enterprise.
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How to create a 3D printed version of yourself
Twinkind, a firm based in Germany, allows one to make 3D printed versions of their own, their pet or their relatives
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Compuware bets big on APM market in India
Firm believes that India as a market for Application Performance Management solutions is just beginning to take off
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Hero MotoCorp’s tryst with server virtualization
Vijay Sethi, VP – Information Systems and CIO, Hero MotoCorp shares how the company’s decision to take the virtualization path, at the time when the technology was still surrounded by apprehensions, paid off. He details various challenges encountered during the course of the project and benefits derived out of the initiative
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3 signs your organization needs IRM
There are some in-your-face indications that will emerge from the carcass of your failed use cases that can be taken as indications that your organization is crying out for some IRM help
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Combating cyber threats to national security
Cyber attacks can threaten our nation’s economy, public utility works, power generation systems, communication systems, and computer networks and cripple them for a longer duration, if not protected properly and immediately
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How Big Data security analytics is set to transform the security landscape
By using analytics to understand the big picture by analyzing and drawing connections between disparate sources of information, Big Data security analytics can completely transform the ecosystem of security
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New gaping security holes found exposing servers
Researcher HD Moore so far has discovered around 300,000 servers online at serious risk of hacker takeover
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Recently discovered Android vulnerability puts 900 million devices at risk
Security firm, Bluebox Labs has discovered an Android vulnerability that can enable hackers to take over the normal functioning of the phone and control any function thereof
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Security awareness: How India’s leading CISOs are tackling the weakest link
Human beings are and will always remain the weakest security link. Given this fact, how do CISOs ensure that employees are always clued on to security? InformationWeek’s Jasmine Kohli spoke to India’s leading CISOs who share their perspectives and experiences on some of the projects and measures undertaken by them to ensure a robust security culture
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Why fake Twitter accounts remain a multimillion dollar business
Barracuda Labs digs into the market for buying Twitter followers
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Facebook CSO Joe Sullivan on protecting a billion people from spam, malware and hackers
Given the scale at which it operates, Facebook has an extremely challenging task to maintain security and privacy of its users. InformationWeek spoke to Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer, Facebook, who shares his candid views on his biggest threats as a CSO, the common mistakes that people do on Facebook that lead to their accounts getting compromised, and how Facebook is relying on innovative approaches like crowdsourcing and sophisticated algorithms to weed out fake spam accounts and malware
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What every database administrator should know about security
Database administrators and security people are often at odds with each other. Here are some ways they can get together
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Protecting your website against attacks during high seasons
John Ellis of Akamai Technologies details how companies can protect their websites from attacks during high seasons like holidays and IPL
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Security ROI: 5 practices analyzed
Which security practices bring the best return on investment? Not all of the most popular practices are good for your company
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Would you give away your front-door key just like that?
You would never hand over your front-door key to a complete stranger who called you from a telephone and asked for it. Why, then, do we act so carelessly when it comes to our Internet businesses?
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India ranks 4th amongst countries to be targeted by phishing attacks
Survey by RSA reveals that brands in the US, UK, India, Brazil and Australia were targeted by almost 54 percent of phishing attacks in April
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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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‘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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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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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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Microsoft launches 'Smart Cities' initiative
Microsoft recently announced CityNext, a global initiative intended to develop "smart cities" around the world. Unveiled at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, the plan leverages Microsoft's Partner Network to help cities become more efficient even as they struggle with austere budgets and decaying urban infrastructure.
If CityNext succeeds, cities will improve efficiency by installing Microsoft products that harness the cloud and big data.
Mobile access to big data tools and cloud-powered enterprise apps could give workers on-demand access to advanced analytics, with sources ranging from vast databases to real-time data culled from environmental sensors. In theory, these technologies should allow workers to more quickly derive insights, collaborate with one another and come to decisions. This sort of efficiency could not only save lives during an emergency but also drive day-to-day savings that total millions, and perhaps even billions, of dollars over time.
That sort of cost-reduction will take a while to develop, of course. The case studies Microsoft revealed Wednesday were more modest. The company introduced Barcelona, Spain, as a CityNext customer, for instance, that used Azure to host a platform that aggregates city statistics and makes them publically available. Via an app, citizens can monitor fluctuations in areas such as population density and total unemployment -- information that could hypothetically lead to more informed economic decisions, such as whether to open a business, start a family or purchase a home.
Microsoft announced eight other CityNext customers: Zhengzhou and Hainan Province, both in China; Auckland, New Zealand; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Hamburg, Germany; Manchester, England; Moscow, Russia; and Philadelphia, the only U.S. city to sign up so far.
Smart cities are commonly associated with companies such as IBM and Cisco, and, more broadly, concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT). Microsoft's IoT interest is comparatively less publicized but the company has nonetheless been working within this space for a number of years.
IoT touches on the connected multi-device ecosystem that the company is trying to build around Windows 8, for instance, but other examples range from earlier work on "smart cities" to the massive surveillance system the company built for the NYPD. Products such as Windows Embedded, which can be installed in point-of-sale devices and other end points on the edge of the network, also factor into this theme.
Microsoft missed out on the first wave of mobile apps, while Google and Apple both capitalized. But Microsoft's efforts suggest the company is intent on catching the next wave, which is likely to involve cloud apps and big data as much as mobility itself. The company's executives don't say "Internet of Things" nearly as often as they say "Azure," but Steve Ballmer's vision of the connected future -- and Microsoft's role in it -- is becoming more defined. That said, it's still not clear how all the pieces will fit together, both within the Windows ecosystem, and among the non-Windows connected devices in the larger IoT landscape.
In addition to CityNext, Microsoft also announced a Windows 8 Digital Flight Bag, a cloud-based product that allows F16 fighter pilots to replace cumbersome physical manuals with a variety of private apps. Apple's iPad has been used in a similar fashion. Read More
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LatentView strengthens foothold in India
LatentView, a pure-play business analytics solutions provider today announced its plans to strengthen its presence in India by ramping up operations and inaugurating its ‘Analytics Center of Excellence’. The 50,000 sq. ft center, called ‘Gravity’, will be the primary office for LatentView’s global operations.
LatentView also plans to increase its current headcount to 500 people in FY 2013-14. This Analytics Center of Excellence in Chennai, located in Ramanujan IT city, Old Mahabalipuram Road, is a premium facility offering high-quality infrastructure combined with extensive amenities for work, recreational facilities and everyday activities.
Venkat Viswanathan, Founder & CEO, LatentView said, “We are constantly being bombarded with data from all directions. Today, it is said that approximately 2.5 billion GB of data is generated every day. Indian data industry is expected to grow to USD 1 billion in 2015, from approximately USD 200 million in 2012. This has paved way for niche analytics services.”
Highlighting the expansion, Venkat added, “To meet the demands of the growing market, we found the right talent in India, with an optimal blend of business, data and math skills, which is instrumental in our growth. The availability of talent and the increasing demand is a clear indicator to the market readiness to embark on analytics for making the right business decisions.”
LatentView founded in 2006, offers niche result-oriented analytics solutions to consumer intensive businesses in insurance, technology and retail industries.
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India SMBs IT Services spending is growing at a healthy 17 percent year over year
As end-users based in Metro cities in India reach saturation vis-à-vis adoption of most IT products and services, Tier-II and III cities are gradually reaching the next wave of technology adoption. IT Services plays a major role in this increased adoption. Consequently, major IT vendors and service providers are setting their sights on these India Tier-II and III cities for marketing their service offerings. IT Services account for a substantial 16 percent of total small and medium business1 IT spending in India indicating its importance for future SMB growth. While Product Support Services and Professional Services account for a huge majority; over three-quarters of the total IT Services market, Remote Managed IT Services (RMITS) has displayed a much faster CAGR and is fast becoming accepted as a mainstream service delivery model. These are some of the key highlights emerging from AMI-Partners study - 2013 India SMB ICT & Cloud Services Tracker Overview.
The services and solutions segment in India is in a gradual growth-phase, especially within the mid-market segment. When considering which service provider to use both SBs and MBs state that scalability as well as total cost of ownership are important factors. In spite of this similarity, there are subtle differences as well. A basic but significant difference between small and medium businesses is that typically SBs needs tend to be centered around ad hoc problem resolution with little focus on problems that are sure to arise going forward. MBs, which tend to have dedicated IT professionals on staff, are more aware of a future needs based services concept. India SBs indicate that pricing and a well-known brand influence their decision while India MBs stated they consider a providers ability to align with their overall business processes and business road map to be important factors. These medium businesses also indicated that meeting regulatory compliance standards is a key factor when purchasing IT products and services.
The conflict regarding IT adoption still persists in the minds of many India SMBs. While there is a definite need for simplifying business operations - the vision towards technology adoption is myopic. "These companies often feel they are not ready for large scale IT deployment and that the investments necessary are too great in an already tight financial situation," says Rati Ghose, Director - Market Insights, AMI-Partners India. However, the tide is changing. "With the business environment becoming increasingly competitive, there is a need for India SMBs to become highly cost competitive and lean. As businesses expand, there is a strong need for integration not only of physical entities such as branches and outlets, but of data, information and work flows. For instance, with centrally managed services, development and expansion percolates to other regions at a faster pace," continued Ghose.
A majority of firms utilizing cloud/hosted solutions have indicated that their service and support needs have remained unchanged, however about one in four have indicated that their support needs have actually increased. This is somewhat counter-intuitive since service and support is inherently built into the Cloud. However, this has probably occurred for India SMBs in the initial stage of cloud adoption who need significantly high service and support levels related to training, hand-holding, data migration and overall cloud-related know-how. It can be well surmised that as these firms progress in their cloud adoption path the need of service and support will gradually diminish.
Remote Managed IT Services (RMITS) is at an initial stage of adoption for India SMBs at penetration levels of 19 percent and 28 percent for SBs and MBs, respectively. However, future adoption plans exist as SMBs' gradually appreciate the benefits of RMITS, e.g., greater ROI due to hassle-free, quick problem resolution from a distance. RMITS growth is also likely to be boosted due to factors like improved networking/connectivity and broadband infrastructure, as well as greater availability of RMITS management tools. Another factor fueling the growth of RMITS is that channel partners are progressively adding RMITS to their product/services offerings in order to cater to interested potential customers. "The costs are constantly being evaluated at each stage by both the service providers and clients and there is an understanding that this delivery model is a more feasible and sustainable option," says Ghose.
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How Mergers and Acquisitions affect customers
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in India is seen improving over the years with companies increasingly leveraging the advantages offered by the company being acquired. This is largely affecting the organic growth of the smaller players in the industries. The IT market, for example has small, medium and large software vendors. The core strength of these IT vendors is to provide a gamut of software products with deep technical expertise. These players have become the game changers because of the incremental innovation that they bring to the market. However, it’s the end of the road for most of these smaller players as their bigger rivals acquire them for business growth and expansion. If one analyses the key business acquisitions over the years one would understand the resulting side effects on the customers.
Acquisition is a key business strategy followed today, otherwise known as horizontal integration. A firm is being taken over by, or merged with, another firm which is in the same industry. The significant drivers of such integrations are to venture into new businesses and markets; increase the market share; and consolidate and aim for monopolizing the market – most often not understanding the sentiments of the customers of the smaller company that is being acquired.
Popular acquisitions in the last ten years
In 2007, Quest acquired ScriptLogic with the purpose of meeting the Windows management needs of SMB customers besides adding 19,000 customers to the Quest portfolio. But the story was short lived with Dell acquiring Quest in 2013, bringing all the acquired companies under Dell management. We can see this trend continue with examples of other acquisitions such as BMC's acquisition of Numara and Magic solutions, Oracle's acquisition of SUN, BMC's acquisition by a private equity consortium, and the list is endless!
These examples clearly illustrate the strategy behind the acquisitions as one that focuses on cashing-in on the technology competencies and expanding the organization to show what we call as 'inorganic' growth.
Acquisition behavior and its impact on customers
For most of the big players, it is a herculean task to focus on engineering new products all the time. An inorganic growth allows them to increase the business size by acquiring their rivals in the same market with the customers left to bear the brunt of such acquisitions. Some common issues that stem from these consolidations are:
• Conflicting motives: The acquired company’s objectives may not align with that of the acquiring company’s, thus, impacting customer relationships in terms of SLAs (Service Level Agreement).
• Increase in product prices: An acquisition comes with a cost and it becomes difficult for an organization to manage the products at the existing cost post the consolidation. This could be due to an increase in the expenditure on the operational overheads, leading to an increase in price for the prospects and existing customers.
• Product Stagnation: When an organization acquires a new business in the same vertical, there is a huge possibility that the scope of the product growth might hit a dead end. This is due to the lack of market expansion outside the existing customer base, halting the product growth altogether.
• Calling off support for the product: Support forges the relationship between a business and its customers by enforcing confidence with technical assistance to fulfill the IT service needs. A product team consisting of an engineering department, product management and the support department should work coherently to understand the changing needs of the customer and meet customer expectations.
Support engineers are the front runners who play a proactive role in understanding the needs of the customers and delivering solutions instantaneously. Support is a vital link between a product and its users. The changes in support policies post acquisition can adversely impact the customers.
How to overcome customer woes in case of an acquisition?
Most of the acquisitions by large organizations are driven by profits rather than customer needs. It is hence imperative for the customers to shop for the products smartly. The usual practice for customers is to understand the product, run a few trials, and then deploy it.
In order to be prepared for the timely needs of an acquisition scenario, customers should be a step ahead in terms of understanding the product strengths and looking at the vendor's customer base. A basic research on the company's mission and background will help. An organization which is a mesh of acquisitions tends to attach priority and preference to monitoring the balance sheet. On the contrary, organizations that build products from the scratch with an in-house R&D, gain from a thorough understanding of customer’s pains and help create an ecosystem that fosters bond between the customer and his vendor.
In short, customers must shortlist a vendor with a history of solid engineering expertise and have built solutions from the scratch rather than by relying on acquisitions or mergers.
- Vijay Saradhi, Marketing Analyst from ManageEngine
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How to declare independence from bad social media
Taxation without representation was the straw (or, at least, one of the straws) that led the colonists to declare independence from Britain. Of course, users of social media don't have as important a cause or as big a fight as our forefathers did. But as we get ready to celebrate the birth of our country, we can't help but think about the ways in which users should be declaring their own kind of independence from people and habits that are bringing them down on social media.
Go on. Rise up and declare independence from:
1. Privacy Concerns
Either get on the ball and vow to truly understand the privacy settings (and implications) of the social networks you have presence on, or get off the social networks. Your privacy and personal information is far too precious to take for granted.
2. Annoying People
When you first joined Facebook, you probably said "yes" to every friend request. You may be regretting that enthusiasm now, as you read yet another thinly described brag session from someone you remember vaguely from high school, or when you cringe at the foul language used by a former co-worker.
You don't have to sit there and suffer. I recommend hiding people rather than unfriending them. The latter just carries with it too much baggage for my sensibilities. On Twitter, you may have found that your initial enthusiasm has you following far too many people. Unfollow 'em. I could be wrong, but unfollowing doesn't seem to carry with it the same kind of connotations that unfriending does.
3. Oversharing
While you are declaring independence from annoying people, make sure you are not being annoying yourself. Oversharing is one of the most oft-committed social networking sins. Ask yourself: Do you share every meal, every pound lost (or gained), every ache, every pain on Facebook and Twitter? Do you think people want to know the details of your root canal, along with photos? If you can answer yes to any of these questions, you are likely oversharing. Take it down a notch -- or 10.
4. Social Ruts
You're more than likely using Facebook and Twitter. Maybe you have also gotten sucked into the product and recipe black hole that is Pinterest. Don't stop there. Innovations are happening all the time, and you often don't know how useful (or just interesting) something will be until you try it. You say you don't "get" Vine, for example? Make (or watch) just one six-second video of your kids or pets and I predict that you will not only be hooked, but that the ideas for how the videos can play out for marketing and branding purposes will start to flow immediately.
5. Professional Suicide
Too many people still pooh-pooh social altogether. It's your choice, of course, but if you have a job or plan to have a job in the future, you need to be on social. Yes, I said it. It doesn't matter if you work as a developer or a marketing executive or a customer service representative. If you work in the business world, HR professionals and hiring managers will Google you at some point in the candidate vetting process.
If you are on social and your presence is littered with questionable photos and posts, you won't get the job you are after. If you have no social presence whatsoever, you are very likely not to get the job. Social presence is just part of the resume for most jobs these days, and it will not be long before it is a requirement for all professionals. Read More
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Big Data analysis drives revolution in travel
"We're seeing tangible, pragmatic business benefits using big data, whether it's to increase the look-to-book ratio, decrease the cost of operations, boost revenue yields or increase customer satisfaction," says Herve Couturier, executive VP at reservation services giant Amadeus.
Couturier's observations stem from "Big Data in the Travel Industry," a report Amadeus just released with analysis provided by Tom Davenport, the noted analytics expert, author and college professor. The report finds that innovative approaches are flourishing, with a growing list of real-world examples of big data and advanced analytics in action:
British Airways is doing more to remember personal preferences with its Know Me program, which goes beyond the loyalty programs based strictly on mileage rewards. For example, it can spot when passengers choose window seats for short-haul flights and aisle seats for long-haul flights because they want to stretch their legs, and that pattern can be repeated automatically.
"They're combining everything they know about passengers, and historically that sort of information has been very fragmented across a variety of system," said Davenport. "They're also bringing that information to the front lines -- even to the cabin crews using iPads -- so it adds up to an impressive effort."
Sojern is collecting and aggregating information across airlines, hotels, rental car agencies and credit card companies and is using machine learning and advanced analytics to develop rich profiles of segments of travelers to determine "when people go, where they go, how many people are travelling, and preferred brands, travel times and class of service," said Rick Farnell, president and co-founder of Think Big Analytics, the Mountain View, Calif.-based consulting firm that helped Sojern with its analytics.
Sojern's insights are used by the very same airlines, hotel chains and car rental agencies to hone their pricing and selection of services. "Customers like Delta or Starwood can find all the business travelers that flew between New York and San Francisco over the last month, and it helps them make the right cross-sell and up-sell offers and shape their inventories," Farnell said.
Travelocity applies analytics to pricing, inventory and advertising, and all three dimensions shift on a daily basis depending on supply and demand. It's using techniques like look-alike modeling, next-best-offer analysis and recommendation engines to push the right offers to customers that fit certain profiles.
"They're pre-thinking a lot of patterns that they want to see, but they're constantly changing the experience on a daily basis as demand changes," Farnell said. Hadoop is the environment that handles the big data ingest, he said, and analytic models are then pushed out to the edge applications that trigger decisions in real time.
Multiple airlines are pushing revenue management to the next level by calculating, for example, the value of a group of customers who will miss a connection due to a flight delay and then determining whether to delay their connecting flight or book them on the next plane.
"You have to have a deep understanding of the value of the group, gate availability, the possibility of getting another takeoff slot and so on," said Couturier.
Multiple hotel chains are doing test-and-learn analyses in which they study just how much to spend and where to spend on renovations. High-end hotels, for example, tend to spring for interior renovations whereas low-end, roadside hotels spend on the exterior to attract drive-by guests. But it goes further than that.
"Hotels have generally found that the mid-level renovations are the ones that pay off," said Davenport. "It's different for a Red Roof Inn than a Ritz Carlton, but the returns level off after a certain point."
Many hotel chains have also learned to do dynamic pricing based on the source of the reservation. Priceline customers, for example, tend to spend less on food and beverage services than do Orbits customers, says Davenport, so that can be figured into pricing.
Most uses of big data and advanced analytics fall into three categories: improving internal operations, optimizing pricing and inventory and better serving customers with context. In all three cases the challenge adds up to big data due to the sheer number of destinations, flights, sailings, trains, rooms, prices and days in the year.
"If you multiply all the choices you get trillions of possibilities, and when you search, you want to know exactly and quickly the best fit," said Couturier. "That requires a lot of computing power and change in technology."
That change has included an embrace of grid-based systems for high-speed analytics and open-source platforms such as Hadoop for enriching data with context that was previously unavailable.
"It's no longer just about finding the cheapest or the shortest flight, it's about finding the most-favored flight that has the positive sentiment, the destination with better weather or the better family hotel," Couturier explained.
In a cautionary note for the innovators of today, Davenport pointed out that the airline industry led a wave of innovation back in the late 1970s and early 1980s in areas including revenue management, loyalty management and operational analytics, but there wasn't much of a next act.
"The key takeaway is that you can't be innovative and then sit on those achievements for 20 or 30 years," he said. "Everybody uses those techniques today so they're just a cost of doing business and there's no competitive advantage anymore." Read More
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Amazon introduces “Amazon Associates Program” in India
Amazon.in today unveiled the Amazon Associates program in India –a premier marketing program that lets online publishers of all sizes effectively monetize their content by advertising contextually relevant products and referring visitors to Amazon.in. Publishers can select from over 17 million books, tens of thousands of DVDs and Audio CDs, thousands of genuine items in Consumer Electronics, and the entire Kindle range of devices. It’s completely free to join and an easy and effective way to improve experience for visitors and make money at the same time.
Amazon Associates provides a cost-per-action advertising model where any associate ranging from large and small businesses to bloggers, authors, nonprofits, personal home pages and more, can easily create a link to a contextually relevant product from the Amazon.in catalog. Associates earn a percentage-based referral free when customers click through and make a purchase on Amazon.in. The commission extends to all products the visitor buys and not just the specific product that was advertised. Amazon’s trusted brand ensures a good customer experience for visitors, which translates to better conversions and higher commissions for Associates.
As part of an introductory offer, Amazon is launching the Associates program with rich commission rates ranging from 5 percent for Consumer Electronics to 10 percent in all other categories, including Books, Movies and all Kindle devices.
Explaining the benefits, Amit Agarwal, Vice President and Country Manager, Amazon India, said, “Millions of online websites, small and big, around the world showcase relevant Amazon products and earn high commissions. It is a win-win proposition, your visitors see contextually relevant products and you have a new source of income. Associates in India will have access to the same tools and the trustworthy tracking and reporting that millions of associates worldwide have enjoyed over the last 17 years.”
Website owners who sign on for the Associates program also get access to Associates Central, a dedicated Associates portal where associates have the option to build links, view traffic and earnings reports, and read about the latest news and opportunities available through the program. Associates Central also offers access to a library of convenient and effective widgets, linking tools including text links and rich banners that make this very easy to use for individual and small publishers.
Associates also have access to the ‘Associates Site Stripe’ – the quickest and easiest way to link to any page on Amazon. The Site Stripe lets signed in Associates build links as they browse the Amazon.in website. Associates with development resources can also use the Product Advertising API and XML data feeds to seamlessly integrate Amazon’s rich catalog with their content.
“We are happy to partner with Amazon via Amazon Associates program” said Pranay Chulet, CEO, Quikr, India’s leading on line platform to buy and sell goods. “We are seeing good results, and are pleased with the program’s transparency on payments and reporting. We look forward to further deepening our relationship in the days to come.”
As per personal technology columnist and founder of the widely read tech blog, Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal, “The Amazon Associates program has been helping web publishers monetize content by showcasing relevant products to their users. Now that the Associates program is available in India, it will help thousands of publishers here, big and small, expand their advertising options and look beyond AdSense." Agarwal has also signed up to be an Amazon Associate. Read More
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IT can make your doctor wash his hands
Fact: Many doctors don't wash their hands between patients. This may be partly responsible for nearly 100,000 deaths per year due to infections contracted in hospitals.
Fact: CIOs can fix this. Sure, it doesn't seem immediately like their job to do so, but given the life-or-death situation, someone should step up.
There are a number of vendors offering products designed to enforce hand washing policies. Many of these solutions depend on hardware such as motion sensors and wash room cameras. One of the more innovative solutions however, is AgileTrac from GE Healthcare.
Just to be clear, AgileTrac is not a hand washing monitoring product. Instead, AgileTrac could probably best be categorized as a hospital workflow system. AgileTrac uses a Real Time Location System to track the location of people and equipment within the facility.
Location tracking is only one part of what AgileTrac does. It also has a sophisticated alerting system. Alerts can be triggered by changes in location or by timers, and can be used to launch workflow processes. For example, because the software is able to monitor the patient’s location it can be configured to automatically alert an anesthetist 10 minutes after a patient has been moved into pre-op.
This location tracking and alerting technology is being used in at least some facilities as a way of tracking clinician hand washing. For example, suppose that a hospital had a policy stating that staff must wash their hands prior to entering the room of an ICU patient. In such a situation, the software could be provided with the locations of ICU rooms and with the locations of washroom sinks. Because the software is able to accurately track the location of clinicians throughout the facility, it is possible to make sure that they visit a sink prior to entering an ICU room. In fact, washing up prior to entering a patient’s room could be treated as a workflow, and an alerting mechanism could be used to send a notification to a supervisor if the workflow is violated.
Of course, making sure that a clinician visits a sink prior to entering a patient’s room is different from making sure that he thoroughly washes his hands prior to interacting with the patient. In the case of AgileTrac, the software could conceivably be configured to track the amount of time that the clinician spends at the sink, thereby improving the odds that the staff member is thoroughly washing his hands.
Ultimately however, location- and timer-based workflows can be fooled. There is nothing stopping a clinician from simply standing in front of a sink for the required length of time without washing his hands. Although AgileTrac doesn’t directly address this problem, there are competing solutions available that do.
For example, some facilities have experimented with motion sensors and cameras. When a sink’s motion sensor is tripped, a camera sends a live video feed to someone who is responsible for making sure that the employee is washing his hands properly.
Since hygiene is of such importance in clinical environments, it should come as no surprise that these aren’t the only solutions being used to track hand washing. A Michigan company named Biovigil is using sensors on a badge to track hand washing. The idea is simple. The badge uses a red light/green light system, in which a green light indicates that the employee’s hands are clean. It can sense the use of alchohol hand rubs to make sure the careworker has used good hygeine. The system also keeps track of hand washing over time to insure targets are met hospital-wide.
Yet another approach is being implemented by GOJO Industries. The company, which also makes Purell, is using wireless monitoring to track soap and sanitizer dispenser usage. While this approach might not directly track clinician hand washing, it does keep track of soap and disinfectant usage and can alert hospital staff to areas within the facility with lower than expected usage.
Ultimately, I have to admit that the concept of using IT solutions to monitor hand washing sounds really strange. You'd think doctors could be trusted to do this. But when you really stop and think about it, healthcare IT exists for the purpose of improving operational efficiency and patient care. Hand washing has a direct effect on patient care since it helps to stop the spread of infectious diseases, which makes facilitating the monitoring of hand washing a legitimate IT task. If you want to do some good, CIOs, this is a pretty easy place to get started. Read More
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Pune emerging as big destination for technology startups: Nasscom
After shortlisting 332 applications for Angel Funding and Acceleration under its recently launched ‘10,000 start-ups’ initiative, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) today organized a first of a kind Startup Pitch Sessions where Entrepreneurs pitched their start-ups to more than 20 Angel Investors and Accelerators under one roof.
NASSCOM also released insights on the tech entrepreneurial landscape based on the 4000 applications that it received for Angel Funding and Acceleration under the 10,000 Start-ups program. NASSCOM had started inviting applications for the 10,000 Startups program on April 5th 2013 and closed applications on 30th May 2013.
On this occasion, Rajiv Vaishnav, Vice President, NASSCOM said, “After a comprehensive evaluation process carried by our partners, we have selected 332 of the country’s best early stage tech start-ups for the second round of the program. In order to provide a much larger canvas to these companies, we are organizing Pitch Sessions around the country where we are providing these start-ups an unprecedented opportunity to pitch to multiple angel investors and accelerators on a single platform.”
Speaking about the Mumbai Tech start-up ecosystem, he said – “Despite of a much more vibrant investing landscape, Mumbai ranks as a distant third behind Bangalore (23 percent) and Delhi NCR (20 percent) in terms of the number of applications. Pune on the other hand, is emerging as a strong contender by contributing with 6 percent application and 8 percent start-ups from Pune making it in the shortlists.
The application procedure revealed some interesting insights about the emerging tech entrepreneurship landscape in Mumbai. Out of the total applications received from Mumbai, about 22 percent start-ups aimed at providing solutions pertaining to education and skill development followed with 21 percent providing solutions in Retail. Although Mumbai is known as the national media hub, only 12 percent applications aimed to solve problems in media which is even below the national average of 15 percent.
With reference to the demographics of the applicants, about 63 per cent applications came from applicants under the age of 30 and about 12 percent applicants were women. From a technology point of view, a whopping 60 per cent of the applications came for web/internet start-ups, followed by mobile start-ups occupying a share of 24 per cent. Applications from Cloud and Big Data were at 14 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.
NASSCOM had commenced the 10,000 Start-ups program with the support of Google, Kotak, Microsoft and Verisign. Read More
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Windows 8 store hits 100,000 apps
The Windows Store now includes more than 100,000 Modern-style apps for Windows 8 and Windows RT. Microsoft's marketplace crossed the six-figure threshold a little over eight months after launch -- much faster than Google and Apple's respective stores achieved the same volume.
The milestone might seem like a triumph for Microsoft. To an extent, it is. But the company was slow to embrace the mobile game, and much has changed in the meantime. While 100,000 apps is a victory, it's a qualified one.
Apple took more than a year to hit the century mark, and Android took even longer. But Microsoft allowed both platforms a big head start in the mobile space, and both capitalized. The iOS ecosystem boasts more than 850,000 apps, including more than 350,000 optimized for the iPad, and the Android universe is comparably huge. Windows 8 arguably has the most software leverage of any platform, with the ability to run not only the Modern titles but also legacy x86 applications. But that capability has produced only incremental improvements in market share.
Microsoft's achievement must be measured according to a new context, in other words. The world-beating standards to which prior Windows releases were held are much more difficult to sustain. There are too many options, and BYOD has given consumers much influence. The question isn't merely if Microsoft can catch up in the apps race but also how the company will respond to the millions of users who can't be tempted from competing ecosystems.
On the topic of whether Windows 8 can catch up, its progress has been laudable but mixed. MetroStore Scanner, a site whose Windows Store tallies are often cited between official Microsoft statements, reports that after Windows 8 launched, app submissions dropped until February. Since then, activity has been on the rise. Microsoft has been offering USD 100 bonuses for new apps, and touting its revenue-sharing model, which pays up to 80 percent to the developer, as superior to competing opportunities. These efforts, as well as the steady stream of Windows 8.1 rumors, no doubt contributed to the renewed interest.
Last week, Microsoft used its Build developers conference to launch a preview version of Windows 8.1, an update with which the company hopes to address lingering unease about its Live Tiles interface. Unsurprisingly, June was also the Windows Store's best month to date, according to MetroStore Scanner, with around 640 new apps submitted daily.
But that progress is only part of the story.
When it comes to desktop dominance, Microsoft remains the undisputed champ; Windows versions cumulatively account for more than 91 percent of the market, and the Windows Store, the eventual destination for future desktop apps, trounces the Mac App Store for OS X.
But tablets are another matter. The number of Modern apps has risen, and Microsoft has secured some big-name partners, including Facebook. But the Windows Store still has an unfavorable quality-to-quantity ratio, and it still lacks major titles. True, 100,000 is a big number, but until more of the catalog attracts users, celebration is premature.
Even then, Android and iOS devices have cultivated committed user bases. People are using the tablets not only for recreation but also for work. Windows is still the most important OS in the enterprise, but If Microsoft doesn't extend some of its business software to its mobile competitors, it risks losing some of them to competing solutions.
Microsoft responds to threats
The company has responded to this situation in several ways. This week, Microsoft rolled out a new version of OneNote for iOS and Android devices. Mac users are still stuck with the Web-based version, but Microsoft's willingness to play in competing ecosystems reveals a facet of the company's strategy -- namely, that iOS and Android can funnel users into Office 365, even if those users never consider using Windows 8.
Last week's release of a SkyDrive Pro app for iOS is another example, as is the company's promise, made this week, to release a mobile-oriented version of Dynamics CRM by this fall for both Windows 8 and the iPad.
On the other hand, Microsoft has also declined to release Office for the iPad, and its iOS version is only useful to those who also subscribe to Office 365. In the new landscape, the company must execute a complex strategy that alternates between defiantly proprietary and surprisingly open.
To a degree, the company has navigated this dilemma before; Microsoft Office is available for OS X, for example, but it's not as modern as the version available for Windows. Still, compared to past examples, Microsoft's new plan involves navigating a more complicated field.
Last week at Build, Microsoft added a few wrinkles to its "open" strategy. The company can still profit from iOS and Android apps, its representatives suggested, if Azure becomes the cloud infrastructure that supports them.
Microsoft also opened Bing as a development platform. At Build, Microsoft VP Gurdeep Singh Pall said the program can bring the "unbounded knowledge of the Web" to apps, and demonstrated examples that included apps integrated with 3-D maps as well as voice recognition, speech controls and language translation capabilities. Microsoft's APIs are mostly intended to help Microsoft developers make more engaging Windows 8 apps, but some attention is being extended on competing platforms as well -- another example of the tightrope the company is now traversing. Read More
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Gartner lowers global IT spending forecast for 2013 by 2.1 percent
Worldwide IT spending is projected to total USD 3.7 trillion in 2013, a 2 percent increase from 2012 spending of USD 3.6 trillion, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. Last quarter, Gartner's forecast for 2013 IT spending growth in U.S. dollars was 4.1 percent.
The 2.1 percentage point reduction mainly reflects the impact of recent fluctuations in U.S. dollar exchange rates; growth in constant currency is forecast at 3.5 percent for 2013, down only slightly from last quarter.
"Exchange rate movements, and a reduction in our 2013 forecast for devices, account for the bulk of the downward revision of the 2013 growth," said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner. "Regionally, 2013 constant-currency spending growth in most regions has been lowered. However, Western Europe's constant-currency growth has been inched up slightly as strategic IT initiatives in the region will continue despite a poor economic outlook."
The forecast for spending on devices in 2013 has been revised down from 7.9 percent growth in Gartner's previous forecast to 2.8 percent. The decline in PC sales, recorded in the first quarter of 2013, continued into the second quarter with little recovery expected during the second half of 2013. While new devices are set to hit the market in the second half of 2013, they will fail to compensate for the underlying weakness of the traditional PC market. The outlook for tablet revenue for 2013 is for growth of 38.9 percent, while mobile phone revenue is projected to increase 9.3 percent this year.
Enterprise software spending is on pace to grow 6.4 percent in 2013. Growth expectations for customer relationship management (CRM) have been raised to reflect expanded coverage into e-commerce, social and mobile. Expectations for digital content creation and operating systems have been reduced as software as a service (SaaS) and changing device demands impact traditional models and markets.
Telecom services spending is forecast to grow 0.9 percent in 2013. Fixed broadband is showing slightly higher than anticipated growth. The impact of voice substitution is mixed as it is moving faster in the consumer sector, but slightly slower in the enterprise market.
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Why LinkedIn is betting big on content marketing
In today’s day and age with the amount of information that consumers are bombarded with, it is very important for brands to be seen and heard in the right place. With the average consumer’s way of making a purchase decision becoming more sophisticated, for brands, connecting with and putting their message across has become more complex than ever before. It is not just the quality or quantity of advertising that persuades them. They are using the web to educate themselves before making a purchase decision. Brands can no longer afford to rely only on the traditional ways of communicating with their target audience. Instead, they need to be prepared with a steady stream of content that is relevant.
Relevance is the magic word! The need for being relevant and accurate is what drives brands towards social media. The various social media outlets present brands with an opportunity to champion organizational change across multiple lines of business, through data and content that appeals to their target consumers.
Being the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn offers brands an opportunity to be contextual and relevant. We realize that Content Marketing is here to stay and hence it is at the heart of the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions strategy. For example, the various elements that a member sees on his LinkedIn homepage is content that surfaced to him based on the information in his profile and what his network is up to. For example, LinkedIn Today displays articles from the member’s industry, the news feeds that consists of a specific piece of content from a company that the member is following, the network’s activity and lots more. Alongside this, on the right rail, are the traditional banner ads that are again tailored according to the member’s profile information.
We are continuously scaling up our product innovations to help enterprises hire, market and sell more effectively. With this objective at the core of our business, we are working towards developing LinkedIn into a professional publishing platform. Our hero product in this category is the Influencer posts. Several thought leaders and industry experts from across the globe are sharing unique knowledge and professional insights in the form of original posts that in turn is enabling our members to start or join a professional discussion on LinkedIn.
We are creating a strong platform within a valuable context for businesses that want to target and engage with an influential, affluent and educated audience on LinkedIn. The various tools under LinkedIn Marketing Solutions are transforming the way brands build relationships. Take the example of Company Pages that allows a company to distribute highly meaningful and relevant information to their followers. Further enabling more relevant conversations between companies and followers is the Targeted Status Updates. This feature aims to make it easier for members to receive relevant information from companies they follow and in turn lets companies communicate with their followers in a very personalized way by providing tailored content.
It won’t be long until companies begin to see real value through this direct engagement with their consumers. Through highly targeted content marketing efforts they are building relationships and at the same time amplifying their key messages among their target group.
The author is Group Marketing Manager at LinkedIn
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Microsoft aims to put a factory on every desktop with support for 3D printing
3D printing has been used to manufacture everything from jewelry, toys, guns and even prosthetic limbs. However, while 3D printing has traditionally been used by big manufacturing companies like GE and Boeing, Microsoft has rightly sensed an opportunity to offer support for 3D printing via your desktop. Recognizing the new found popularity of 3D printing among the do-it-yourself enthusiasts, the software giant recently announced that Windows 8.1 update will have built-in support for 3D printing.
Microsoft believes that making a 3D object on your PC must be as easy as writing a document in Word and sending it to print.
In a blog post on the Official Microsoft Blog, Shanen Boettcher, General Manager of the Startup Business Group at Microsoft, writes that the Windows 8.1 update will include plug-n-play support for printers, enabling apps to seamlessly submit 3D print jobs, understanding 3D file formats, and connecting lots of apps with lots of hardware to deliver an end-to-end solution for customers. “We want this to be so simple that anyone can set up their own table-top factory,” states Boettcher.
Microsoft has already has partnerships with firms such as Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, Makerbot and Stratasys. With market analysts predicting that the global 3D printing market will reach USD 3.1 billion by 2016, the 3D printing opportunity is huge. This is best summed up by Boettcher when he says, “Just as desktop publishing transformed how we write, we think desktop manufacturing will transform how we create.” Read More
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Wi-Fi that sees through walls
Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have come up with a way to create a low-power, portable device that can see through walls using Wi-Fi signals.
Technology of this sort, similar in concept to radar or sonar, has existed for years and relies on radio waves and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is used mainly in law enforcement and military applications, ideally when the law allows.
Wall penetration systems have become common enough that the U.S. Department of Justice last year funded a market survey of what's known as "through-the-wall sensors," or TTWS.
Security products maker Camero-Tech, for example, offers its Xaver line of through-wall imaging devices for defense and law enforcement applications. But with prices at about USD 9,000 for the handheld Xaver 100 and USD 47,500 for the 7 lb. Xaver 400, these aren't consumer products.
The legality of TTWS technology is sufficiently unclear that ManTech Advanced Systems International, the company that prepared the market survey, recommends those planning to use TTWS equipment seek legal advice in advance.
In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of thermal imaging to monitor what's going on inside a private home violates Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. But as the ability to see through walls reaches the civilian market, this legal boundary is likely to be tested again.
There is at least one consumer TTWS device on the market already, STI's Rex Plus, an USD 80+ device that can be placed against a wall/door in order to sound an alarm when someone approaches the opposite side of the wall/door.
Dina Katabi, a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and graduate student Fadel Adib propose wider civilian use of the technology through a simple, affordable device like a mobile phone, equipped with two antennas and a receiver.
In an email, Katabi suggested the technology, which she calls WiVi, can be used for virtual reality and gaming, without requiring the user to remain in a specific area in front of a sensor. She also says the technology could be used for personal safety.
"For example, if I am walking at night in an isolated area and suspect that someone is following me, hiding behind a fence or around a corner, I can then use WiVi to detect that person and alert myself to the person's movement," she said.
Katabi says WiVi can be used for "privacy-preserving monitoring," such as tracking the movements of elderly people or children without actually having them on camera.
In time, however, improvements in Wi-Fi-based sensing may require a reexamination of the privacy implications of making walls effectively transparent.
"Today the technology does not show body parts or the face of the person," said Katabi. "Hence it is naturally anonymized. However, as we improve the technology it will start giving higher resolution images for things that one cannot see because they are behind a wall. This will raise privacy related questions. As a society, we still have time to look at these issues and ensure our society has the right policies by the time such high-resolution version of the technology becomes available."
That future already has been contemplated: University of Tokyo researchers have developed paint that blocks Wi-Fi signals.
Wi-Fi-based sensing appears to be a particularly active area of research at the moment. At the University of Washington, researchers have developed a related technology, WiSee, a Wi-Fi-based gesture sensing system that duplicates the functioning of sensor-based motion detection systems like Leap Motion and Microsoft Kinect without the sensing area limitations. Read More
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TCPS launches India’s first white label ATM network ‘Indicash’
Tata Communications Payment Solutions Limited (TCPSL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Communications Limited, has launched Indicash - India’s first-ever network of white label automated teller machines (ATMs).
In line with the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) vision to accelerate growth and increase ATM penetration across the country, the first Indicash ATM was inaugurated today at Chandrapada, a rural village in Thane district, Maharashtra.
This launch was led by a senior Reserve Bank of India (RBI) official, Vinod Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, Tata Communications, and Sanjeev Patel, CEO, Tata Communications Payment Solutions Limited.
Indicash (‘India’ and ‘cash’), marks a milestone for the country and ushers in a new era of ATM accessibility for the masses across cities, towns and villages. Backed by the USD 100.09 billion Tata brand, India’s first network of white label ATMs is aimed at empowering millions of Indians with the convenience to access their own money with ease.
Sanjeev Patel, CEO, Tata Communications Payment Solutions Limited, says, “We are honored to be selected by RBI to pioneer India’s first white label ATM network. This is an endorsement of our leadership, credibility and track record in deploying and managing a contracted 27,000 ATMs for banks in India as of date. Our goal is to rollout 50,000 ATMs by 2016. With Indicash, we will be going into far reaching geographies using our experience and expertise in navigating and optimising technologies, for challenging Indian conditions. We are focused on honoring the Indicash brand value ‘Dost Har Mod Par,’- ‘A friend in need’, by being conveniently located and offering a safe and user-friendly banking experience.”
Indicash was designed using consumer research that TCPSL conducted across India which identified the main concerns surrounding the use of ATMs. The research showed ATM cards being swallowed, charged, short dispensation of cash, intimidating environments, difficult user interfaces and privacy / security as the top-of-mind concerns when using ATMs in India - especially in Tier 3 to 6 locations.
The new Indicash ATMs have been designed to eliminate these fears and concerns. Indicash machines are Dip machines that cannot swallow cards; the interface has been designed to be intuitive and simple with multi-lingual messaging to provide ease and convenience of transactions for users across urban and rural markets. Features that address security concerns are privacy screen filters, key pad shields and electronic surveillance, to enable safe and secure transactions.
Like most other bank ATMs, Indicash offers a host of cash and non-cash services such as cash withdrawals, balance enquiries, mini-statements and PIN change. It accepts all domestic debit cards with the first five transactions per month being free, in line with RBI regulations for use of ‘Other Bank ATMs’. Read More
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Unifying education through the power of technology
Since the very beginning imparting education needed a student to be in sight of the teacher and the tools used included nothing more than something to write with – pen, pencil or chalk – and something to write on – paper, slate or a board. And then there was the phase of ‘distance education’ – with its set of limitations. This ultimately led to a wider gap, where building concepts via rote method did not create efficiency through structured thought processes. This used to get them restricted to limited learning. For instance, meaning of mastering computer science meant knowing to operate computers and not knowing mastering the skill of appropriate computer software. Likewise, knowing to make a power point presentation did not mean creating an effective power point presentation. Thus, using technological ways to help students build concepts has been the change now.
For today’s Gen Y, collaborative learning is no longer an innovation – it is an expectation! Students are consuming information in new and different formats – video, internet, virtual classrooms. These tools are changing the face of education. To make this transformation a reality, students, faculty and administrators need to reliably connect with the people and resources they need whether they’re using their desktop or mobile device, at home or in the classroom.
The power of Unified Communications (UC) allows people to communicate with one another, anywhere, anytime and on any device. UC has marked its footprint in a number of major sectors such as IT / ITes, Retail, Education, BFSI, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. Let’s look at the education vertical, where the transformational power of UC has been radically changing the way education is being imparted across the country.
The challenge that confronts the Indian education system is shortage of trained teachers. The Right to Education (RTE) Act-2009 mandates that there should not be more than 40 students per teacher in a classroom. Research shows that India will require 6 million more teachers by 2020 to attain the world average in terms of student-teacher ratio. This would mean a requirement to train 0.75 million teachers per annum, whereas the total capacity across all B.Ed. colleges in India currently stands at about 0.25 million per annum.
In fact, the shortage of faculty members is two-pronged. Firstly, the number of faculty members, who are adequately trained and qualified to teach courses and offer programmes to an increasingly large number of students is small. Secondly, the teaching population’s average age is way beyond 35-40 years. So the challenge is in the context of education and research in India, the major challenge is to get good quality faculty who would be able to teach courses and offer new age programs to an increasingly large number of students.
What can one do in such a situation? Qualitative education can be imparted with the usage of UC and technology can play a role to address this issue to a great extent. UC offers immersive telepresence, high-definition video conferencing and live streaming technologies that can transform the learning experience of an individual and create unique reach out formats. Educational institutions can create multi-campus education in India by connecting all campuses at an unprecedented scale.
Technology is capable of handling end to end needs of an institution. With globalization, the Indian institutes are looking to maintain and live up to the standards set by their global counterparts. To meet the expectations set by a global student, the Indian institutes are increasing looking for innovative solutions which will enhance the teacher’s efficiency; improve the student’s learning process as well as positively impact operational efficiency of the institute as a whole. Lately many institutions are focusing on creating a multi city model. The expansion by Indian institutes to foreign land and vice versa has created a need to connect the institutes – for learning as well as infrastructure leverage.
With the help of telepresence, faculty and students living miles apart can collaborate and share their knowledge and learning face-to- face. This reduces travel time for the faculty and the students alike and allows professors to work from any one of the campuses of the institute across the country. Hence, Telepresence reduces requirement for faculty members for running specialized courses, enabling them to spend more time in research. Additionally, it reduces the requirement for faculty members and helps bring academicians from across boundaries to teach and mentor students in our country.
UC can be a game changer
UC can thus be a game changer and be an important contributor in the way in which education will be imparted in India. Going forward, UC can help institutions improve the teacher-student ratio. Education is on the transformation journey where technology has made deep inroads. Many institutions are also exploring the option of delivering education via video. Today, delivering education to multiple schools through video gives a leeway to deliver the best expertise to the remotest corners of the country.
On the business side, this trend of UC in the education space, has generated a steep curve for vendor and solution integrators. With greater demand and the potential to embrace newer means of Unified Communication (UC), India Incorporated understands the strong need of technology integration in this sector. Hence, there are investors and educational trustees who see the value in technology being the change that brings business value to the table.
UC offers a variety of solutions to meet the growing demand –
• Video Conferencing – Connects the institutes worldwide seamlessly. Lately it has been observed that there is a shortage of well qualified and experienced faculty. VC will enable a teacher to give lecture to multiple classes located at different places at a single instance.
• Smart Classroom – A classroom with all the modern technology like Wifi, session recording system, interactive whiteboard, remote controlled features help in visualizing the concepts in a better way and is an effective tool for a teacher to meet the new challenges and to enhance the performance of the students.
• Security and surveillance solutions – To monitor and control the access of students, teachers and outsiders. RFID and biometric solutions ensure that the campus is well protected and secure.
• Classroom Management – Enables a teacher to take control of student’s laptop. Thus restricting any irrelevant or inappropriate content in the class.
• Smart Alerts – Helps in sending regular as well as emergency alerts to students, parents, guardians via SMS, email and voice call.
The moral of the story remains unchanged, while the brick and mortar model of teaching shall prevail but with technology, the experience will be enhanced as its reach becomes pervasive. Students can interact with teachers across boundaries.
Education with technological advancements can help generate a productive future…
- Subir Bhatnagar is Vice President and Global Head-Solutions at AGC Networks
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Nokia brings augmented reality to job search
Nokia is giving job seekers a new tool in their search for gainful employment: JobLens, an application that marries augmented reality and social networking with the goal of pairing employee-hopefuls with employers.
JobLens is similar to Nokia's City Lens in that it uses Nokia's HERE mapping suite together with the browser and camera on its Lumia Windows Phone 8 smartphones. Nokia calls its augmented reality suite LiveSight. With the app running, job seekers pan their phone around any given area and they will see what companies in the region are hiring, explore job listings and view the listings from multiple angles (street view and birds-eye view) for improved orientation.
The information is presented on top of what's visible in the camera's field of view. If the user pans the Lumia smartphone across a McDonalds, for example, and that particular McDonalds is hiring, an informational bubble will pop up over the McDonalds in the viewfinder. The same will happen with any business that is linked into the app.
JobLens sinks its hooks into LinkedIn, Indeed, Salary.com, Facebook, Twitter and Zillow to create a unique "job network." It then parses any job data in that network and maps it to the app to help people find jobs based on those connections and their location. Users can see recommended jobs, as well as search, save and share jobs, and begin the application process directly from their phones. It even links with SkyDrive so that sending a resume is as simple as adding it as an attachment.
Nokia is one of the few major phone makers still pushing hard to deliver augmented reality apps. The CityLens app uses LiveSight to provide local search information. It can be used to find the names and other details of local businesses, for example, using the same method described above. Nokia also added LiveSight to its HERE Maps product for better from-the-street viewpoints and the Windows Phone 8 FourSquare application. Qualcomm is another company pushing augmented reality, at least to developers. Though standalone AR apps and browsers are available to Android and iOS devices, Nokia's integration with its vast mapping databases gives it an upper hand.
Version 1.0 of JobLens is free to download from the Windows Phone Store, though it is only compatible with Nokia's Lumia-branded Windows Phones. It won't work on other Windows Phone 8 hardware. Nokia continues to favor its own gear with unique and compelling apps, which is perhaps one reason the company is now responsible for 80 percent of all Windows Phone sales around the world. Read More
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MNC R&D centers in India contribute just 2 percent to global patent grants, says Zinnov
Advisory firm Zinnov today released its latest study titled “Enhancing the IP Quotient in MNC R&D centers”. The report highlights the current state of IP generated by MNC R&D centers India and the initiatives being taken to boost IP activity through collaborations in the Indian ecosystem. While the study reveals that IP creation is witnessing steady growth in MNC R&D centers, investments in R&D and patent activities in India are still relatively slow when compared to other developed & emerging geographies.
While India spends 1.0 percent of its GDP on R&D, countries like Israel (4.2 percent), Japan (3.7 percent), USA (2.7 percent), and China (2.0 percent) have dedicated larger spends on R&D and innovation. In terms of industry sectors, Pharma, Biotech and Computer Technology companies are leading contributors to IP creation in the country. Pharmaceutical & Biotech companies alone contribute to 30 percent of the patents filed from India (2007-2012).
Foreign firms with R&D operations in India, in particular, are playing a key role in the growth of patenting activity in India. USPTO patent grants received by leading MNC R&D centers in India have grown exponentially, at a CAGR of 41 percent in the last five years to cross 3,800 patents in 2007-12. Several global, high impact IP creations are now coming out of MNC R&D centers in India. Adobe’s PageMaker 7, Cisco’s ASR 901 Cell site router and GE’s portable ECG machines, amongst others, represent some of the locally crafted products that have found global uptake.
Although the US patenting trend is improving, the MNC R&D centers in India contribute just 2 percent to the global patent grants received by the company despite having a critical mass of local engineering talent. In addition, the average patent density (number of patents per 100 R&D employees) of global centers in China and Israel is 2-3 times more as compared to that in India. To bridge this innovation gap, the report details on how MNCs are actively collaborating and leveraging the growing innovation competence that exists in the India ecosystem including in universities, government R&D labs and startups.
The Government of India specifically, being the largest R&D spender in the Indian economy, is taking multiple initiatives to drive R&D in the ecosystem. Leading government entities like CSIR, DRDO, ICAR, Dept. of Biotechnology and the Dept. of IT are among the top Indian applicants for patents among scientific and research development organizations. CSIR alone has close to 2800 patents granted till date and contributes to highly qualified S&T manpower by producing 500 PhDs each year. Several MNCs have collaborated and entered into JVs to leverage the research capital of the government R&D labs in India. Recent example includes the Swedish aerospace and defence behemoth SAAB’s recent JV with HAL for developing electronic warfare systems.
In addition, the ability of Indian universities to generate a large pool of engineering talent year after year has ensured a critical mass to pursue varied innovations. Several MNC R&D centers in India are leveraging the increased research focus in universities to co-create and innovate. Bosch, P&G, General Motors, Yahoo, Texas Instruments & Mercedes-Benz are some leading organizations sponsoring research on innovation in Indian universities.
Commenting on the potential for the IP creation in India, Preeti Anand, Engagement Manager, Zinnov, said, “The IP landscape in India is expected to improve with the rapidly evolving ecosystem and multiple opportunities in key growth verticals. With several top-notch innovations coming from India in the recent past, innovation in India is expected to accelerate driven by combined efforts of all ecosystem players”.
The report also brings out how current business challenges including increased competition, margin pressures, attrition and inflation etc. are forcing Indian IT services companies to look at non-linear models of growth. TCS and Infosys in particular have been at the forefront of building strategic R&D alliances with ecosystem partners including MNCs such as Alcatel Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, SAP, British Telecom, Alstom etc. to strengthen their non-linear strategies.
In addition, the growing startup community in India backed by strong VC and Angel ecosystem is presenting opportunities for R&D collaborations. Few MNCs such as Microsoft and Intel are looking to engage with start-ups through multiple models that include evangelism programs, venture fund investments and advisory networks. This is fuelling the growth of innovation and encouraging other companies to follow suit. Read More
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Bharti Airtel and Google join hands to launch Free Zone in India
Bharti Airtel and Google today announced the launch of Free Zone powered by Google, which will give Airtel mobile customers access to mobile web search and feature-phone-friendly versions of Gmail and Google+ in India. The first page of a website linked from search results is provided at no data cost.
Free Zone aims to put the web in the hands of more people and empower first time Internet users with several useful services of the Internet. Airtel mobile customers can access the service by visiting www.airtel.in/freezone and simply start using the Internet without having to sign in to the service. Any user can create a Gmail account instantly on the Free Zone homepage and enjoy a multitude of connectivity and social media services from Google.
Rajan Anandan, VP and Managing Director, Google India said, “The mobile Internet user base is growing really fast in India. Working with Airtel on this exciting trial means that we can offer Internet services at no cost to anyone with a phone. This gives people easier access to information in a way that benefits everyone, whether it’s an individual or a small business that wants to reach more people on the web. We hope this initiative will encourage more Indians to experience the value of the Internet and gain from it. Students can easily look up for facts to work on their assignments, housewives will be able to easily check on recipes and connect with their friends and family from their mobile phones.”
“As the country’s leading telecom services provider, we at Airtel are constantly looking for new ways of exciting more and more of our 200 million plus customers in India about the data experience. In this market, where feature phones predominate, our association with Google to bring Free Zone to India will encourage millions of users to discover the power of mobile internet for the very first time and leverage the amazing world of information search, email and social collaboration - at no incremental cost” said N Rajaram, Chief Marketing Officer – Consumer Business, Bharti Airtel.
Free Zone aims to make the web accessible and affordable to all mobile users. The expansive set of powerful internet services available via Airtel includes Google Search – which will take Free Zone users to websites matching their search query, Gmail, and Google+ which enables users to share photos and messages with social groupings of family, friends and business or work associates. While Airtel subscribers will not incur any data charges to access these services on Free Zone powered by Google, access to more advanced services such as Attachment Download or browse through to web sites from the ones accessed in the Free Zone would be enabled through the subscription to a standard data package.
Airtel mobile customers will be able to access the following services from mobile phone browsers through Free Zone powered by Google:
- Gmail: Users have unlimited access to Gmail from their mobile browser. If users click on a link or attachment within the email they are directed to a page where they can purchase a data package.
- Google+: Users can share online photos and messages with circles of family, selected friends or the public; follow updates on the things they are passionate about - from cricket to photography, music to news; and follow people they’re interested in.
- Google Search: Users can search the entire Internet and access the first page of websites from the results for free. If they click further into a website after that, they are directed to a page where they can purchase a data package.
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The first 100 days as a CIO
You only get one chance to make a first impression, right? When it comes to taking the top IT job at an organization, it isn’t merely that first impression that counts. That first impression got you the job. But, much like the President, much of your momentum and future success will be determined during the first 100 days. This is when people are most receptive to the change a new leader brings, and it gives you the best chance to put your stamp on the job.
Here are a few tips and ideas for your first encounter with the C-Suite:
Assess the current state of IT
You will need to talk to many people, inside and outside of IT. There will be lots of questions you may ask, but ultimately, they will boil down to two key ones: What does IT do well and what does IT not do well? Be astute and listen to what your peers, staff, and customers tell you. Ultimately, you must decide what the true current state is -- but this time, especially if you are new to the organization, is the one and only time you can actively and openly seek this information.
You are in the people business
Your staff will ultimately be responsible for your success. Do you have the right talent? Is that talent in the right positions? Is your organization structured properly to meet the demands of the business? If the answers to these questions are anything but an unqualified yes, change things. Support, coach, and develop your team. Again, this is going to be your best time to get people to accept major changes.
Establish credibility
This is more critical for those who are new to their organization as opposed to somebody who came up through the ranks. You were hired because you made an impression. Impressions rarely equal instant credibility. I made the mistake, during my first few days on the job, of not coming to total grips with this. As a result, I overreached a few times before it became clear to me what was missing -- early, meaningful results. Use your “honeymoon period” to find and push through some early wins. Use it as the base to solidify your position.
You have likely noticed I have spoken little about technology here. This position is less about the technology than you may initially like. Not that you should ignore the technology, but you were likely hired into this position for reasons other than your technical savvy. What have you seen from new CIOs in their first 100 days on the job? What other items would you suggest need to be addressed during these first days on the job?
- Dan Martinez is CIO of Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association
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iGATE wins USD 100 million global infrastructure services contract from MetLife
iGATE Corporation today announced a new five-year contract valued at over USD 100 million for providing global infrastructure services for MetLife, Inc., a leading global provider of insurance, annuities and employee benefit programs, serving 90 million customers.
Celebrating the completion of 10 years of partnership in providing services globally to MetLife across North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific, this additional deal deepens iGATE’s relationship with MetLife, further increasing its level of engagement to include complex and mission critical services. Post the ALICO acquisition, MetLife has been executing on its strategy to simplify operations to realize the benefits of its global footprint and be better positioned to meet customer needs, reduce operating costs and operate as a truly global company.
iGATE participated in a competitive bid to assist MetLife in building out an Innovative Infrastructure model to manage its IT systems towards greater efficiency and flexibility, in order to drive lower costs and increase business agility. The bid was awarded to iGATE on its quality and creativity of the solution, as well as innovative commercial structuring based on the industry leading ITIL based Infrastructure support model.
Jim O’Donnell, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure & Architecture (CTO) MetLife, Inc. said, “We are delighted to further strengthen our 10-year association with iGATE. With iGATE’s support in technology and operations, MetLife is committed to provide a best-in-class customer experience whilst we continue to drive efficiency, eliminate redundancies that add cost and complexity & improve our understanding of customers. The year-on-year productivity and quality improvement parameters were clearly visible through the Managed Services program it provides.”
Commenting on this engagement and the MetLife relationship, Sanjay Tugnait, EVP, Head of Sales - North America and Global Head of Alliances, iGATE, said, “This win is a strong validation of iGATE’s domain and technology expertise in the insurance industry. Our 10-year long relationship with MetLife has given us deep understanding of the company's global businesses and will enable us to achieve definitive business imperatives for them in terms of both cost rationalization and high levels of service delivery.”
The solution cuts across a portfolio comprising of Data Services Engineering and Implementation, Middleware Support and Implementation, Infrastructure Application Development Services, Enterprise Networking and Messaging, Infrastructure Project Management and Infrastructure utility services. iGATE’s solutions will also be differentiated by its flexible technology stack to enable SLA measurement.
“Through this contract, we will enable MetLife to transform its service delivery framework from a resource and capacity based model to a scope and service level based one. With our operating model design and a predictable cost model, we will significantly increase our accountability in the engagement; accelerate multi-skilling, effort rationalization and process harmonization, thereby creating the foundation for an optimized pay for performance construct," further added Ganesh Iyer, Senior Vice President, Insurance, iGATE. Read More
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Tech Mahindra announces completion of merger with Mahindra Satyam
Tech Mahindra Limited, a specialist provider of information technology (IT) solutions and services to the telecommunications industry, and Mahindra Satyam, a leading global consulting and IT services provider, today announced the formal amalgamation of Mahindra Satyam with Tech Mahindra.
The Company is amongst the top 5 Indian IT services companies and the merged entity creates a technology services powerhouse, with revenues of USD 2.7 Billion, a team of 84,000 professionals servicing 540 customers across 46 countries.
The brand dons a new look and logo, reflecting the heritage of the Mahindra Group and our positioning represents the new connected world, offering innovative and customer-centric services and solutions.
"Today we have fulfilled the commitment made in 2009, when we acquired Satyam, to jointly become one-of-the largest, diversified players leveraging Technology for Business Solutions. Tech Mahindra is a testimony to the tireless efforts of our associates and the trust reposed by our investors. I’m confident that we are now geared to grow even faster in the future," said Anand Mahindra, Group Chairman, Mahindra & Mahindra.
"Over the past four years while we worked through the statutory and legal issues, our teams worked closely on the ground to integrate processes, eliminate overlaps, leverage best practices and deliver enhanced value to all our stakeholders. Today, as we formally become one, our unified Go-To-Market strategy will allow us to meet the growing needs of businesses with renewed vigor and pro-activeness," said Vineet Nayyar, Executive Vice Chairman, Tech Mahindra.
Speaking on the occasion, CP Gurnani, Managing Director, Tech Mahindra said, “Consumerism across today’s connected world is being fuelled by a convergence of technologies. Our new positioning ‘Connected World. Connected Solutions.’ reflects this business opportunity and reality. Our innovative and customer centric offerings integrate technology with business, enabling Enterprises, Associates and the Society to Rise. I thank all stakeholders for their continuous and unfailing support at all times.”
The Boards of Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam had approved the merger on Mar 21, 2012. After an approval from Mumbai high court, the merger had been awaiting clearance from the Andhra Pradesh High Court, which gave the nod on Jun 11, 2013. Read More
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Analytics helps Central Bank of India uncover hidden insights in customer data
How is analytics helping Central Bank of India?
The Central Bank of India is now one of the few public sector banks achieving complete automation of corporate performance management activity on a bottoms-up approach. The convergence of a number of factors including the constantly changing regulatory environment, as well as the desire to uncover deeper customer insight from massive data, were the key drivers behind the Bank’s decision to streamline its financial systems.
As a result of IBM’s solution for corporate performance management, the company is now able to gain better insight into branch and regional office performance, allowing for further flexibility and quicker shifts in strategy to drive improved results while also maintaining regulatory compliance.
With the use of analytics, the Central Bank of India has moved away from spreadsheet based planning to a smarter process that analyzes daily financial data based on actual performance and potential for growth. Equipped with specialized planning features, and simplified data capturing at the branch and regional office level, the IBM solution has helped the Bank to uncover new sources of customer value. With the rapid explosion of Big Data, collecting, sourcing and analyzing real-time data from multiple sources is a growing challenge for banks. Our solution will help convert data into insights that will enable better decision-making and risk management to maximize profits while enhancing customer loyalty.
Could you share some more details on how analytics is helping the bank transform specific functions?
The entire budgeting exercise of the Bank is now conducted through IBM’s solution which cuts planning cycle time in half and significantly improves accuracy of financial reporting by automating previously time consuming manual processes and ensuring that systems across the Bank’s locations and product lines are interconnected.
This enables the Bank to get real-time insight on performance efficiency as well as the capability to track deposits, loans and non-performing loans data on a daily basis. Another key part of the Bank’s transformation was the implementation of state of the art Static Asset Liability Management Solution which enables the company to reduce liquidity risk and also minimize impact of interest rate and foreign exchange rate movements. As such, the Bank has achieved total automation of this tedious and time consuming process by consolidating approximately 7.5 million deals and trade positions across the company.
Central Bank of India also engaged IBM to implement Single Data Repository in addition to its analytics solution. After full implementation, the Bank will be able to get a consistent, 360-degree view of each customer across all bank branch and product lines and uncover hidden insights in customer data, so as to anticipate needs, reduce churn, increase wallet share and make smarter decisions that maximize customer satisfaction and profitability.
In your view, which are the growth drivers that are going to shape the future of Indian banks?
To grow, banks need to develop new business models; focus on new markets, new customer segments, new products and develop innovative channels to expand reach. Indian companies are increasingly expanding overseas leading to increased cross border trade and investment flows requiring banks to build capability to meet the global aspirations of Indian companies. Other banks will look at developing their SME banking business as many of the future blue chip corporations will grow from this base whilst some might look at unearthing the potential of rural wealthy. Many banks, in search of lower CASA deposits, will look at expanding outreach to capture the pool and supply of savings deposits.
Your view on the biggest challenges for banks?
The biggest challenge ahead for banks and financial service firm is to manage complexity arising from increasing and rapid changes in regulation and corporate governance. Higher capital requirements; a dwindling pool of low cost deposits, intense competition and drying up of sources of fee based income are some of the key challenges that banks face. Even the biggest and best managed banks have witnessed sharp losses on account of inadequate risk management. Further, non-banks like Telcos and FMCGs have been allowed to participate in the origination and delivery of financial services. Banks need to sit up, take notice of these, and look at co-opetition seriously. Lastly, banks need to take cognizance of and respond appropriately to the emerging customer who because of the
information age and social media, is very aware and very demanding.
What new opportunities do you envisage for the banking sector?
Many large Indian conglomerates have a significant portion of their revenues accruing from outside India. Likewise, there is a large under banked and unbanked market in India waiting to be tapped. Banks will capitalize on both emerging global and local rural opportunities. Newer technologies are aiding banks to create newer products and tap newer markets. The advancement of analytics is helping banks and financial services firms gain new, unprecedented insights of their customers as well as of their risk exposures. The explosion of social media interestingly holds opportunities for banks to get the pulse of their customers in real time and respond appropriately.
What are the imperatives for banking leaders to manage huge volumes of information?
Banks are being bombarded with data from newer and newer sources. With the advent of social media, on line and mobile commerce, banks need to manage not just the structured (and historical) data residing in their data bases but also the massive unstructured data arising from these newer channels.
This deluge of information or 'Big Data' makes it imperative for banks to think and act in fundamentally new ways. Banks need to be able to respond to unstructured data rapidly to provide time-limited and location based campaigns and offers and take corrective action on customer servicing issues. It is important to note that this does not do away with the traditional business analytics efforts of banks. Harnessing unstructured data is a supplementary effort and in the medium term structured and unstructured data can be pooled together to arrive at more meaningful analysis. Read More
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TVS Motors does a ‘nano’; shows innovative way to measure business value of IT
1. How did the concept of 'Nano' originate?
Before 2000, the IT department (then called EDP) was considered as a function providing computing and printing services. Predominant services were for material and financial accounting like book-keeping for inventory, payroll etc. After introduction of ERP, business processes were integrated and automated to improve productivity. However, even after stabilization of ERP, IT has been still considered as a transaction processing function and not viewed as a tool to drive business value. For my IT function, the major focus was to ensure uptime and availability of the systems and making marginal improvements in the functionality of the IT systems. Hence, a sizable time of the IT engineers were spent in keeping the lights on rather than bringing business values through innovation. Even isolated breakthroughs in some areas were considered as projects and there was no target oriented approach for nurturing innovation and bringing business values. Hence driving the business value in every aspect of IT function was required.
There was a need to bring business orientation in IT staff. Projects were taken based on pressure priority rather than business priority. One of the ways to prioritize the IT initiatives is to measure the outcome on business value in terms of rupees. Return on investment and measuring the value creation were focused and IT staff were made accountable for the outcome of the IT projects. We realized that one of the ways to bring business IT alignment was by bringing IT as integral part of the business rather than the technology service provider sitting independently.
There has also been a need to motivate the IT staff. They are not well remembered and recognized by business colleagues when things going well and they are blamed whenever there is any failure in the system. Hence, IT is remembered in its ‘absence’ rather than in its ‘presence’. One of the ways to motivate them is to measure their performance in rupee terms for better understanding. This will also help in measuring all activities in IT function to evaluate on a common factor be it application development engineers or system administration.
The lowest level in the IT Capability Maturity Framework (CMF) is running IT as EDP function where the prime function of the IT manager is to manage the budget and tasks given. The next level is to manage the IT capability. To take the IT to highest level of maturity where IT is run like a business -- where IT is profit center and not simply a cost center-- business value of IT should be measured and managed. IT executives were asked to talk on their contribution to the business in terms of top line growth and bottom line improvements rather than successful go-live of digitization projects. It is not the number of projects going live but profits generated out of the project. The profits generated were the real metrics.
Managing IT as business is a stage where delivered contribution exceeds the cost of IT. In summary, measuring the IT delivery value in rupees was considered important to drive IT business value propositions, transform IT managers as business people and to run IT as a business.
2. Can you explain briefly the concept of Nano?
While measuring business value of IT delivery is important, the team felt that there should be some novelty in bringing a new approach to motivate the IT managers. Sometimes, we are over enthusiastic and drive our people desperately. However, they contribute small value and spoil the credibility. Business value should be something “BIG” and the minimum value should be Rs 1 lakh (nano car value). In Six Sigma, while measuring the defects, the move from percentage to parts per million (ppm) brought the breakthrough in the thinking in manufacturing quality. Something similar to that is aimed here. Continuous innovation is targeted and benefits are measured on number of nanos created per month – keeping the lights on is not value created. This target is given to every IT staff and first year annualized benefit is measure irrespective of day of implementation. From second year onwards benefits accrued is not measured as IT contribution but considered as daily work management of respective process. However sustenance of benefits is measure independently.
Target nanos are fixed at beginning of the year based on function for every IT staff. Everyone is motivated to measure the business value. For example, a supervisor apart from his target should contribute 20 percent more of his subordinates target and so on. A team’s target is 20 percent more than the total of individual target. This is done so that both individual and team initiatives are nurtured. Also a supervisor with his team can contribute more. Number of nanos will increase from year after year to drive innovation. More importantly Nano achievement is an element of annual appraisal in IT.
Nano project was implemented first in the financial year, 2010-11 in TVS Motor. It was a big bang approach covering all IT staff.
3. What have been the quantifiable benefits (ROI, productivity increase, efficiency etc)
The largest benefit is that my IT staff are talking about business value of every activity they do. For every IT initiative demanded by business managers, the benefit from the project is demanded.
IT initiatives are of three kinds. Those are hygiene activities (security related, network maintenance etc), activities bringing operational benefits (business value delivering projects) and strategic projects to drive or support breakthrough business initiatives. For the second and third types of projects, IT delivery value is measured. We have an ambitious plan to contribute a net surplus this year. Read More
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Passport Seva Project crosses the 1 crore applications processed mark
Passport Seva Project (PSP), the mission mode program of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), which runs in Public-Private-Partnership mode with Tata Consultancy Services as a service provider completed its first year of successful rollout last week. The project which was launched with an objective to deliver passport services to citizens of India in a timely, transparent, more accessible and reliable manner, has achieved a landmark figure of processing more than One Crore passport applications since its inception in 2010.
A six year old boy from Kolkata, Master Adnan Raja became the lucky passport applicant, whose application was processed as the 1,00,00,000th application in the Passport Seva System.
Muktesh Pardeshi, Joint Secretary, Passport Seva Project and Chief Passport Officer said, “Processing more than one crore applications for passports and related services is a noteworthy milestone. Our officials have been working relentlessly to provide hassle-free passport services to the fellow citizens. We have also taken assertive steps to streamline and simplify the process for passport applicants.”
As part of MEA’s e-Governance initiatives, the Passport Seva Project has transformed the passport issuance system across India. The Ministry is improving governance in Passport Offices by focusing on citizen-centricity, service orientation and transparency.
Other benefits of the Passport Seva Project include:
• Longer working hours to benefit the citizens.
• 24*7 Call Center Support in 17 languages
• Complete digitization and processing of application when applicant visits the PSK, reducing the overall time spent and eliminating multiple visits
• Biometric data and photographs taken in highly secure environment
• Granting decision taken in front of the applicant, therefore greater transparency
• Citizens leave the PSK with certainty on the status of their application
• Transparency in the process and online real-time availability of data for ease of monitoring and decision making
• Availability of mobile application mPassport Seva for information and status tracking of a passport application
• Newly introduced online payment based appointments to curb the problem of absenteeism and curb the role of touts Read More
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Windows Phone 8 looks to make a mark in the enterprise
India is one of the largest markets in the world for smartphones. With smartphones occupying a larger percentage of mobile device sales, OS vendors are naturally looking at India as a key strategic market. Microsoft believes that there is enough room for a third player in the market ecosystem, which currently has only two significant OS players, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
“We are seeing good traction in the consumer segment. We have partnered with vendors such as Samsung, Nokia and HTC, and believe that we have a good opportunity to capture a significant percentage of the market in the enterprise space,” says Vineet Durani, Director - Windows Phone Business Group at Microsoft.
Microsoft is betting on the familiarity of the Windows ecosystem to encourage users to use the Windows Phone 8 platform. For example, Microsoft has designed the Windows Phone 8 operating system in such a way that one will not only have access to see a familiar Start Screen on Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices, but underneath they will share the same core components. Additionally, Windows Phone 8 also has Outlook Mobile and Office Mobile built in.
Besides Office, enterprises can also use familiar apps such as Exchange, SharePoint and Lync. With the advanced in-device management for LOB applications using Microsoft mobile device management, Microsoft now has a complete offering for businesses of all sizes.
A good feature in Windows Phone 8 is the ability for companies to publish and distribute Windows Phone apps directly to their employees or other users, bypassing the Windows Phone Store. Users can install apps published by their company only after they enroll their phones for app distribution from their company, and only users that are enrolled for app distribution from the company can install the company apps.
“With Windows Phone 8, we are enabling organizations to take charge of their own business apps. With Enterprise App management, organizations can become registered entities that can develop, package, sign, and deliver custom apps to their users. Organizations can now develop Custom Hubs that function as a one stop shop for employees to get data and apps from their company,” states Durani.
In India, large groups like Essar are piloting projects using Windows Phone 8. “Windows Phone 8 is a natural logical extension of the desktop and laptop, and we are piloting a few projects on this platform in our organization,” says Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group.
Durani also believes that the ability to manage Windows Phone 8 devices will play a big role in the enterprise. For example, handsets can be brought under administrator control using System Centre Mobile Device Manager (SC MDM), allowing firms to apply policies to user devices via their Active Directory infrastructure. Similarly, smaller companies can manage e-mail and access policies via an Exchange server using the Exchange ActiveSync protocol. Read More
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CtrlS signs MoU with Siemens Convergence Creators to offer Secure Workforce Productivity Services
CtrlS, which owns Asia’s Largest Tier 4 Datacenters, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Siemens Convergence Creators. This strategic partnership with Siemens CVC will enable CtrlS to offer Secure Workforce Productivity Service (SWPS) targeted at increasing the workforce productivity of enterprise customers with a 360-degree view and optimizing their operating expenditure.
The offering will revolutionize the end-user computing environment linking the missing step of aligning the IT with workforce productivity, ensuring a transparent valuation matrix, said a press release.
According to the MoU, CtrlS will leverage Siemens CVC’s product CONDIS, a leading asset and resource management solution, for its SWPS offering. This will help manage and optimize the IT and non-IT assets of customers, thereby allowing the SLAs and measurement systems to be rolled out to the workforce, creating a conducive environment, where all elements around the workforce are measurable and auditable.
“At CtrlS, we are committed to providing global standard of services to customers. Many MNCs operating in India and Indian enterprises face various issues in complying with stringent confidentiality requirements and adhering to global standards for their workforce. The Secure Workforce Productivity Services will ensure 360-degree view of their back office operations, creating a transparent measurable setup that will ensure security and productivity measurement parameters be placed for optimization and increased productivity,” said Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder & CEO, CtrlS. “This collaboration with Siemens CVC will empower us to achieve our goal of being an innovative and trusted IT partner to our customers” he added.
“Based on its smart architecture and its high scalability, CONDIS is significantly more cost-efficient than comparable solutions on the market. In addition, CONDIS requires just a minimum of operational investment. It is easily customizable and can be effortlessly extended anytime. With this partnership, we aim to provide tools and technologies for customers to become more productive and focus on their key competencies,” said Rajiv Sulekh, CEO & Managing Director, Siemens CVC India.
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Dell India names Alok Ohrie as President & Managing Director
Dell has named Alok Ohrie as the President and Managing Director, Dell India. India is strategic to Dell both as a market as well as for its service delivery capability. Alok will carry the responsibility of further enhancing Dell’s end-to-end solutions capabilities and expanding the company’s strong presence in the Indian IT market. He will continue to position Dell India for long term success and growth.
In this role, Alok will be responsible for driving growth for Dell’s India market, developing and delivering end-to-end solutions for global & Indian corporations, state and local governments and the consumer business.
On his new role, Alok said, “Dell has a great presence in India. I am very happy and excited to join Dell in leading the company’s transformation to be a top technology solutions provider in India and reinforce its position as an employer of choice in the country.”
Sameer Garde, who previously led the Dell India Commercial business, has moved on to pursue career opportunities outside of the company.
“India continues to play a crucial role in Dell’s transformation, and we are confident that Alok Ohrie with over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry will help Dell to continue the momentum of being a leading provider of end-to-end solutions in India” said Amit Midha, President, Asia Pacific and Japan, and Chairman, Dell Global Emerging Markets. “We greatly appreciate the significant contribution Sameer has made to Dell and the India business. We thank him for his strong leadership and for building a trusted and highly skilled sales team in the country.”
Previously, Alok led IBM’s Systems and Technology Group in India from January 2010. Under Alok’s leadership his team strategically grew the business and developed a strong reputation for developing robust Server, Storage, Networking and Systems Software solutions for their enterprise, SMB, Government & Public Sector customers. Prior to joining IBM, he was President of EMC India and SAARC region and also worked for AMD as Vice President of Business Development and Managing Director of India. He had a prior stint at IBM which spanned over 13 years in various leadership roles and also at Wipro Infotech for four years. Read More
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From Tactics to Strategy
When Peter Drucker made the comment “Culture eats strategy for lunch” little did he know that this quote will become one of the most widely used phrases for business community. In fact I am also a fan of this statement for simple reason of my close association with change management in different organizations where I witnessed the conflict between culture and strategy and saw how difficult it becomes when they contradict.
My experience of successful changes tells me that when culture is in conflict of any strategy, use tactics. Usually tactics is meant for implementing a strategy but can it flow upwards? My answer to this is yes, many a times.
Long back I worked for a manufacturing organization. We implemented Inventory management system but application was being used as data processing purposes and printing transactional reports and receipts. The culture was against usage of automation as the generation of people we were dealing at the top did not believe on computers. Our tactics of providing computer games to those who hated the box resulted in transformation of not just culture and processes but the changed business strategy of planning, forecasting, evaluation which impacted the balance sheet.
Once I had the opportunity to work for a prestigious organization where the relaxed culture and lack of measurement and control, led to delayed projects, overspending etc. We knew that uprooting the deep rooted culture through best practices and forced implementation of strategy of cycle time reduction will create political headwinds which will blow us even before we start. We adopted a “cold start doctrine” of limited correction in pockets and but at the backend our planning was to implement a much larger strategy by connecting the tactical endeavors. Small surgical corrections led to a big change of 20% reduction in cycle time for first 6 months and a stamp of approval.
One of the organizations where I worked had IT focused on keeping the lights on. The strategy for improving operational efficiency by revamping the country wide service management transformation met with cultural resistance. People felt that there is no need to call the helpdesk when they have full control over the “guy on the ground”. Rather than making a big bang change, when we implemented a series of carefully crafted techniques which leads up to the strategy, it worked well. At the end, few remaining pockets of resistance realized “when the winds of change blow, some people build walls others build wind mills” and the rest was history.
In one organization, IT was measured with negative perception. The focus was more on renovation and it was felt that IT had fewer roles to play in innovation. IT was viewed more as an order taker. Our strategy to create a creative culture was met with questions related “Why IT?” or “Not here” kind of beliefs. Feeling this resistance, we decided to piggy back on renovation for its innovation journey which yielded` much acceptance and less resistance.
These are just few examples but my experiments in changing culture from closed to open communication, from perception based to metric based, from an order taking culture to enabling business, from largely operational to combination of strategic and operational, from renovation to innovation, from chaotic to systematic etc has met with more success than failures. In the entire process of implementing the tactics and enabling strategy, change management acts as catalyst. In a conflicting scenario, changing culture with a good strategy can be violent and full of causalities and may even risk the organization. By implementing tactics which leads up-to strategy you will be the only casualty for every successful or failed change as the change will be felt latter when it is too late. While fresh air of change and comfort brings relief to everyone, you will be left to deal with those who used to thrive in the filth you cleaned.
- DD Mishra is Founder and Managing Consultant, CIO Specialist
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Microsoft India announces appointment of Karan Bajwa as new MD
Microsoft India has announced the appointment of Karan Bajwa as the new Managing Director of its sales and marketing group (SMSG) in the country. Karan, who is currently the head of the enterprise business in India, will continue to be based out of Gurgaon, and will report to Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman - Microsoft India. Karan has been with the company for over five years.
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. He has been with Microsoft Corporation since 2003, and moved to the Indian subsidiary in 2010.
Making the announcement, Bhaskar Pramanik said, "In the last two and a half years, Sanket has led the organization to greater progress across various areas. His deep understanding of enterprises and their needs in an evolving economy, his engagement with our customers and partners, and his commitment to building talent within the company has been truly appreciated. We wish Sanket every success in his next role.”
Welcoming Karan Bajwa to the new role, Bhaskar added, “I am very pleased that we are on the right path to growing talent within the company. Karan is a strong business leader who has always led from the front, and his successes both in Microsoft and prior to that are testimony to this. I am confident Karan’s strategic insights will help continue to grow the business in India.”
On taking up his new assignment, Karan said, "It is a very exciting time to spearhead the sales and marketing function for Microsoft in India, with limitless opportunities as the company transforms into a services and devices entity. The five years I’ve spent in the company so far have strengthened my belief that in India, especially, the potential is phenomenal. I look forward to exploring even newer arenas of growth”.
Karan starts his new tenure in July 2013 and Sanket will help with the transition until the end of July.
In an additional planned transition, Floris van Heijst, General Manager – Marketing & Operations, Microsoft India, will take up a senior appointment within Europe in July 2013. Floris joined Microsoft in 2005 and has been in India since 2010. “Floris is leaving behind a very strong and capable marketing organization” Bhaskar said, “and we are very thankful for his contribution to the India subsidiary.”
Floris’ replacement will be announced shortly. Read More
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Rise of the Digital Citizen
In the mid-90s a popular mobile handset manufacturer came up with a popular tagline “connecting people”. Nearly two decades later today one can reflect on the foresight displayed by the creators of the advertisement for the prophetic nature of those two simple words. For today’s world is all about connecting people.
The advent of the internet and mobile telephony has greatly aided technology enabled development. There are over 2 billion internet users worldwide, with Asia, Europe and North America accounting for the largest numbers. In India, the internet is no longer confined to urban areas with over 100 million internet users. The growth is not restricted to just the internet. At 929.37 million mobile phone subscribers, India’s is the second largest telecom market in the world, right behind China’s 1.341 billion mobile users. So is it fair to say we are on the fast track to move to a transformative society, a primarily digitized country? Not quite.
First there is the issue of ACCESS. It is about digital penetration itself, commonly characterized by the term ‘digital divide’. The digital divide is a breach between the ‘have’s and ‘have not’s – it is an issue linked to the different amount of information between those with access to technology and associated information and those who do not. Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between the digital divide and poverty. With a large portion of the world’s populace in low income countries, there are close to a billion people with no access to technology and associated information. Asia might account for the highest number of internet users at a billion, but the penetration is only 27% as opposed to Europe and North America where there is close to 70 percent penetration. However, research has also shown that the presence of self-service kiosks and e-enabled centers alone do not work to bridge the gap in usage in developed and developing/ under developed countries, or even between rural and urban confines of a country itself. In this respect, the role of education and awareness cannot be overemphasized.
The larger question about enabling ICT access is not constrained merely to improving infrastructure but understanding if the world is really ready to accept and utilize it to extract maximum benefits. This can happen through a mindset change towards digitization - a large scale change initiative that can only be brought about by the government.
Countries like Costa Rica, Finland, France and Greece have the state actively championing the cause of provision to all by enacting laws that prima facie deem internet to be a basic right. Recognizing the rise of the digital citizen and not wanting to sink through the changing tide, the largest users of technology globally, the United States, has actively taken on the task of creating a people focused strategy to strengthen digital networks. Initiated by the White House, this recent strategy clearly outlines a one year plan with milestones and allocates ownership to serve the American people better. The strategy at core sets out to enable the American people to access high-quality digital government information and services. What is important to note is that data sharing is a crucial part of this initiative. Equally important are the steps that need to be taken to ensure citizen data privacy.
Australia too aims to be one of the largest digital economies by 2020 and has the National Broadband Network (NBN) under development with an aim to ensure that all Australians have access to the benefits high-speed broadband can bring. The focus is centered on eight goals addressing easier access to education, health and government services, and increased opportunities for business, and rural access. These goals will be reached through public private partnership initiatives sponsored by the government.
Accenture’s digital citizen pulse survey shows that respondents in India believe there are very few barriers to ICT enablement and usage in India. Citizens are happy to use various digital channels and projected a decrease for non-digital channels in the future. However, the survey also revealed a preference to use the Internet for ‘safe’ tasks such as tracking and payment, but a high number prefer ‘high touch’ by speaking to a representative to resolve issues at present.
It is clear that governments worldwide have taken a firm hand in bringing forward e-governance, so what then is the potential roadblock to creating a digitized world?
It is about the WILL to execute. Strategizing and creating roadmaps for digitization is a great step forward, but a critical aspect to be factored in is the preparedness for executing the initiatives. Identifying and addressing barriers such as lack of education, infrastructural changes and language differences (where English may not necessarily be the first language) are some but there may be others mired in deeper cultural issues that are local. In other words, the ground work and preparation needs to be solidly managed before migrating to a full-fledged roll out of government initiatives, which could greatly save time, cost and improve acceptance and usage.
A closer look at the initiatives in Asia, gives an indication of how governments of the developing world are trying to digitally connect with citizens in innovative manners. The government of Hong Kong provides incentives monetary (for example, cash, gifts etc.) and non-monetary (for example, personalized services) for using certain services online. Closer home, in India, the government has made the use of online services more appealing, like in the case of filing tax returns, renewal of passports etc. Understanding that local language is also a hindrance in furthering technology growth, the governments of Thailand and China actively promote local language content by linking websites with translations.
The other aspect influencing execution of a digital strategy is the public policy. Let’s zoom in to India for this one. Our 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. The current legislation is not in line with what citizens require to freely and comfortably use digital media. Legal provisions such as 'Section 66a' of the Information Technology Act, which forbids "sending false and offensive messages through communication services" can lead to three years in jail, and threaten to forge a divide between the progressive, informed Indians and their representatives. Case in point, the recent arrest of two young girls in Mumbai expressing their political sentiments on a social networking site was a clear indication of the prevailing mindset. On the other, murkier side, the IT Act provides for rather loose regulations around data privacy. Interestingly, the respondents to Accenture’s digital pulse survey concur – a majority believes that a barrier for digital development is people not wanting to share too much data with government agencies. While any case of misuse or mass infringement is yet to be reported, it casts a pall on the potentially buoyant future of the digital age.
This is not to say there is no need for regulations; they only need to be reformulated with care and relevance. In an age that is seeing the rapid rise of social media – 30 million Indians are active on some form of social networking site each day – rigorous censorship or scrutiny might not be the best way forward for a democratic state of this size and diversity. Instead it is important to sit up and take note of social media and the agility it extends in connecting people. The government has much to gain by learning from how well the private sector has lapped up the benefits through aggressive initiatives, like investments in customized digital advertising.
There has been a step forward in this direction of late though. Recently the Planning Commission hosted a Google Hangout, a modern day town hall meeting, to address the 12th Five Year Plan. And so did the Finance Minister after his Budget Speech. The Chief Minister of Gujarat actively used social media and a very impressive set up of three dimensional imaging to deliver his campaign speech in late 2012. Such tools are increasing the number of avenues for citizens to link in with the governing process. It remains to be seen how well this will be established, but one can hope for a positive outcome.
The past decade has also seen the strengthening of the fourth estate ably supported by social media that serve as platforms to relay impactful messages and grab eyeballs. It is unclear if the government realizes the significance of this development yet, but it is certain that citizens feel more connected to the government in voicing social issues. The Tahrir Square protests in 2011, and India’s own anti – corruption movement in 2012 are testimony to the same. An example of the power common people wield was clear after the mass protests following the tragic rape of a young girl in Delhi led to relatively quick action and change in legislation. This wave of change was driven almost completely by social media.
While keeping citizen requirements at the core of a digital agenda is critical, it is important to note that the evolution of digital government is not solely about meeting citizen expectations. For many governments, the driving imperative for digital government lies in a critical effort to cut costs, and enhance reach, while delivering services. While the government is at a unique place on the digital growth map, it is important to note that digitization is imperative and inevitable to further the next generation of government operations.
What remains to be seen is if India as a country will step up to embrace and contribute to the revolution or wait and watch to learn from the success stories of others.
- Nilaya Varma is Managing Director, Health & Public Service Practice, Accenture Management Consulting
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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
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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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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How to manage Big Data through a compartmentalized framework
Adoption of a compartmentalized framework can lead to quick and clear results
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Siemens and Teradata form global strategic partnership for Big Data in utility sector
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
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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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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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OnMobile launches free mobile app targeted at personal safety
The app ‘Help Me on Mobile’ is aimed at assisting individuals to call for help during medical emergencies, crime situations and accidents
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Microsoft researching on smartphones that can sense your mood
A research paper written by Microsoft Research shows insights into a new smartphone system that has the ability to measure the mental state of the user
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Micromax launches Canvas 4 at Rs 17999
Firm pre-books a record 11500 units in less than a week without revealing specifications or price
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22 percent of malicious apps leak user information: Trend Micro
According to findings of a report by Trend Micro, 293,091 apps were found to be malicious and of these 68,740 were found on the official Google Play store
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How to design a BYOD security tool
Privacy, User Experience and Security are the key factors you must keep in mind when you design a BYOD security tool
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96 percent of androids running old OS versions
Some 90 percent of all mobile threats target the popular Android platform, Juniper Networks report says
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MakeMyTrip launches SMS-based bus ticket reservation
The service will enable entry-level phone users to book tickets for over 12,000 routes across India
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India mobile market grew by 24 percent YoY in Q1 2013: IDC
The growth in market is primarily driven by the surge in the smartphone market, which grew 74 percent Year-on-Year from 2012 Q1 to 2013 Q1
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70 percent of Indian students own a smartphone, more user base in small cities: TCS survey
As per the findings of the survey nearly seven out of every 10 high school students own mobile phones and nearly 20 percent use mobile phones to access the Internet
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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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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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By 2016, employees may have to bring their own devices to work, says Gartner
38 percent of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner
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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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Now, just use a spoonful of water to charge your mobile phone
PowerTrekk dubbed the world's first portable fuel cell charger just needs ordinary water
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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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Google App makes charity social
One Today encourages users to give USD 1 a day to nonprofit organizations
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India’s mobile services market to reach 1.2 trillion rupees in 2013, says Gartner
Mobile connections will grow to 770 million in 2013, an 11 percent increase from 712 million connections in 2012
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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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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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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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Cairn India selects Polycom RealPresence video collaboration solutions
The company has selected Polycom Video Collaboration Solutions for greater organizational synergies and improved access to remote project sites
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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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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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Now, send money to your friends via Gmail
To send money in Gmail, you can just click the $ icon to attach money and send to intended recipients
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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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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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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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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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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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Emerging trends in application security
In today’s fast moving corporate environment, the business application landscape is constantly evolving. New technological paradigms such Cloud Computing, Mobility, Big Data Analytics, and the “Internet of Things” are constantly emerging and rapidly altering the enterprise and consumer computing landscapes.
The challenges for the Enterprise Applications domain are many. On the one hand, the business would like to embrace the opportunities presented by these technological shifts to increase customer and consumer engagement, improve stickiness and adoption of IT solutions, collaborate seamlessly with business partners, and make information available pervasively and instantaneously. However, this constant push towards application innovation brings many threats from an application security perspective.
A layered framework is generally used to assess application security threats and vulnerabilities, with the main layers being–Physical Hardware, Network, OS, Database, Application and Transaction levels. Each of these layers is undergoing dramatic transformation today. At the hardware and network level, cloud computing is transforming the way computing power is accessed and distributed. Multiple new OS platforms are emerging, especially in the mobile client space (Android, iOS etc.). Traditional databases are no longer able to cope with the deluge of “Big Data” - new database platforms leveraging distributed file systems such as Hadoop are emerging. At the application level, the landscape gets constantly fragmented by the growth of cloud applications supporting key business processes such as HR, CRM, Service etc. Demand for internal and external web services and new cloud integration models (on-premise-to-cloud, cloud-to-cloud etc.) in increasing.
Traditional application security approaches such as Web Access Management, ERP SOD (Segregation of Duties) and Application Security Testing are quite mature and widely adopted. However, these approaches rely on application security as an “add-on” that is built and/or tested outside of the core application logic. There are limitations to how far these approaches can address the new vulnerabilities introduced by the trends referenced above.
Recent approaches try to build security into the application from the start. These approaches can be broadly grouped under the theme of “Security by Design”. This changes the paradigm, whereby the security professionals are involved in all stages of the application lifecycle, right through analysis, design, development, testing and deployment. Rather than an audit-based, “outside-in” approach to assess vulnerabilities, failure points and controls post the development of an application, security gets ingrained by way of an “inside-out” approach.
A good example of this approach is an emerging technique called “Model-driven Security”. Application development teams have started to leverage Model-driven methods for analysis, design and development of the application using modeling standards such as UML (Unified Modeling Language). Model-driven security attempts to systematically associate security requirements for process and information flows into such model driven development approaches. These include Confidentiality, Integrity, Authentication and Authorization attributes of process and information flows. As mainstream adoption of Model driven development increases, it is possible to consistency deploy a rich set of security policies across applications.
Another example of a proactive approach to security is the application of emerging Business Intelligence (BI) principles such as predictive analytics, Big Data Analytics etc. to the domain of application security. Today, a host of information exists on prior attack patterns, contextual events/triggers, emerging security threats, real-time event data from scanners and monitors etc. If we can integrate all these sources of structured and unstructured information to extract meaningful analytics, insights and actions, it is then possible to move from after-the-fact to real-time actions. These approaches can be loosely themed as “Security Intelligence”. This domain holds a lot of promise to transform application security.
The domain of application security is too important to be an after-thought to application design and development. Regulatory risks are increasing, as businesses, consumers and governments around the world are hardening their posture through increasing demands for information security and privacy. In addition to outside-in approaches, we need to continue to adopt education, awareness and practice towards building in the application security mindset throughout the development life cycle.
Siva Padmanabhan is VP, Core Applications & Support, Flextronics International. He is chairing a session ‘Bringing strength & maturity in defending App Innovations’ at the DSCI Best Practices Meet 2013. The views are personal.
Read more about the event: http://www.dsci.in/events/about/1336
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5 ways Big Data can improve your car
With all the talk about the benefits of Big Data at work and at home, it's easy to overlook the one area where most of us spend far too much time: our cars. The connected auto is quickly moving from concept to reality, one that promises safer roads and other nifty benefits, provided we're willing to sacrifice a bit more personal info.
But what steps should automakers take to bring this data-driven paradise to their vehicle fleets? According to Dave Ferrick, CEO of Agero, a Medford, Mass.-based provider of connected vehicle services, the trick is to offer enhancements that appeal to both drivers and passengers, but without sacrificing vehicle safety and user privacy.
"What we've been doing in the last couple of years is to look at the services we provide our customers, all the data we collect, and then (determine) how to change the experience within the vehicle," Ferrick told InformationWeek in a phone interview.
Here are his five suggestions for bringing autos into the Big Data age.
Step 1: More cloud. Today's cars have limited cloud connectivity, but more is better. Take GPS navigation systems. With most in-dash units, you need to drive to the dealer to download map updates. Wi-Fi or cellular-enabled vehicles can simplify that process.
"You can actively do it through an embedded cell modem in the vehicle, or when you pass a hotspot or park your vehicle at night," said Ferrick.
If you're willing to divulge information about your driving habits, such as where you do most of your car trips, GPS updates could be tailored specifically for you.
"I don't need the map for the entire country," Ferrick added. "Really, I'm going to be driving within a 50-mile radius, and I would like the most updated maps for that 50-mile radius."
Step 2: Cars need a better human machine interface (HMI). Gauges, dials, touchscreens, even voice recognition: These input devices are all part of today's auto HMI. Drivers are easily distracted by too much visual data, however, and human-auto interaction is very much a work in progress.
Information must be "displayed in a condensed fashion that can be digested quickly," allowing drivers to "move on to the next act without a ton of movement with (their) hands and eyes," said Ferrick.
"What we've been doing in the last few years is heavily leverage voice to put commands to the vehicle," he added.
Step 3: Use the cloud to digitize business processes, such as vehicle maintenance checks. On-board diagnostic sensors determine when something in your vehicle isn't quite right. Cloud-enabled sensors could help expedite auto repairs.
For instance, a diagnostic light goes on in your car, so you drive to the dealer, who's been informed that you're on the way and is expecting you. "They run the test. They say the vehicle is fine, reset the check engine light, and you're on your way," said Ferrick.
Or they offer you weak coffee and stale donuts and make you wait. Still, the potential for better service is there.
Step 4: A cloud-connected infotainment system that personalizes your settings and automatically downloads content.
"If I want to change my Internet radio subscription from MOG to Pandora, how do I do that responsibly in the car?"
Ferrick asked rhetorically. Here's one way: You make the switch on your home PC; your connected auto detects the switch and, when you enter the vehicle, it asks if you'd like to switch to Pandora in your car, too.
Step 5: Deliver information based on driver behavior, including information to help you navigate the last mile of your trip.
"Now that I'm at the mall, tell me how to get that last little piece: where the store is inside the mall," said Ferrick. "With Big Data inside a vehicle, you have a lot of companies trying to get customers with coupons and deliver advertising relevant to their lifestyle."
OK, but what about privacy? Are we willing to exchange even more personal data, including driving habits, for new services?
Ferrick believes a user's "Bill of Rights" would help avert consumer wrath that often results from privacy surprises. "It says, 'I agree to give up this data for this value, and it'll only be used in this fashion,'" he said. "And the more comfortable you can get the customer with that, the more you can walk them down the line."
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‘HP is seeing double-digit growth in India’
What kind of fresh challenges are CIOs facing in today’s competitive business environment? Are these business challenges necessitating the evolution of CIO role into that of a business enabler?
Please tell us about your India-specific business across various industry verticals?
Bruce Dahlgren:
Through the entire region, last year India was our largest growth
country; we are seeing double digit growth in India. When I look at the
progress through APAC and specifically in India, what we are seeing is
the India team is growing 2X the market – so we are not only growing,
but are also gaining market share.
Marshal Correia: In India, we are focused on the manufacturing, banking, government and telecom industries, with each one of them having different set of IT needs. We are witnessing that the PSU banks are making a lot of investments to catch up with the private sector banks. They are making sure that lots of channels are open to them to connect with customers and they are actively investing in enterprise data warehouse, analytics, CRM, etc. Whereas, in manufacturing, while ERP implementation has happened in more or less most manufacturing companies, it is now about how to make the product cycles shorter, add new modules and analytics that need to be implemented to get the best out of IT.
Marshal Correia: In India, we are focused on the manufacturing, banking, government and telecom industries, with each one of them having different set of IT needs. We are witnessing that the PSU banks are making a lot of investments to catch up with the private sector banks. They are making sure that lots of channels are open to them to connect with customers and they are actively investing in enterprise data warehouse, analytics, CRM, etc. Whereas, in manufacturing, while ERP implementation has happened in more or less most manufacturing companies, it is now about how to make the product cycles shorter, add new modules and analytics that need to be implemented to get the best out of IT.
On
the other hand, telcos are making a lot of investment in making sure
that efficient network is available for clients and also to make their
service better. The government is working to build technology platforms
that enable it to pass on information to citizens most effectively. For
example, on top of State Wide Area Networks government is working on
building apps like e-procurement, treasury, etc.
What
kind of trends are you witnessing with respect to the adoption of
disruptive technologies like cloud, analytics and mobility amongst
enterprises?
Marshal Correia:
Since there are certain enterprise apps that can be moved to cloud and
certain apps that need to be run in the traditional environment, hybrid
cloud strategy is gaining momentum. Hybrid cloud strategy enables
enterprises to decide which apps should move to the cloud and which to
keep in house, according to their business needs. For example, an
automobile OEM will have multiple dealerships and it would want all
these business dealers to be able to access specific business-related
data. An ideal thing to do in such a scenario is to set up a cloud
specifically for its dealers.
Typically, customers move into this area when rolling out new apps – dealer management, Microsoft Dynamics CRM or where there is a need of refresh. Virtual private cloud and building a cloud for client itself is where we see multiple opportunities.
Typically, customers move into this area when rolling out new apps – dealer management, Microsoft Dynamics CRM or where there is a need of refresh. Virtual private cloud and building a cloud for client itself is where we see multiple opportunities.
Apart from cloud, companies are also looking at Big Data analytics technologies as we are witnessing a huge growth in data, with 80 percent of the data being unstructured. Businesses are looking out for technologies that can help them analyze interactions that happen in call centers, social media, etc., and extract meaningful information that could enable businesses to take critical business decisions.
Mobility adoption is on the rise in various industry verticals and companies are enabling various functions on mobile devices of enterprise users and customers. For example, banks have already ventured into enabling mobile banking, considering the ubiquity of the mobile devices. Companies are also adopting mobility to enable sales people to access relevant information on-the-go to improve sales and shorten sales cycle. For example, companies in the FMCG sector are using mobile technologies to enable their sales people to access inventory-related details on their mobile device while visiting the retailer, which helps them make instantaneous provisions to refresh the stock level at the retailer’s end within the stipulated time
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Why the cloud can come down to earth in India
In 1991, I was a key member of the team to build the first automated stock exchange in India known as the OTC Exchange of India on dial up telephone lines and subsequently an overlay network network on an Government built X.25 backbone with an X.28 dial up connectivity. The internet was unheard of those days, though a few Software Technology Parks (STPI) did have this connectivity and I remember the slow browser which connected me to the Harvard facility from the STPI in Hyderabad.
We had limitations because we could operate only in 26 cities in India with dialup connections, because the rest of the cities were challenged to carry data on a dial up network.
The second exchange set up by the same promoters used VSAT connectivity to connect brokers across India and became a success, this exchange was the National Stock Exchange.
Picture Left to Right : Sudesh Puthran, the author, Late R. Ravimohan, Sandeep Bagalkar & Karthik Shah
The OTCEI had a VSAT network to deploy the stock prices through the teletext offered by Doordarshan and National Informatics centre. But unfortunately there was only one government vendor of the teletext boxes could not supply enough decoders to service the 1000 brokers of the exchange. And the teletext died a natural death and it was back to Press Trust of India and Reuters.
This illustration is to show how the network and infrastructure can be the differentiator between success and failure in deployment of real time technology solutions like exchanges and cloud computing applications.
I was recently in Bangalore conducting a course on Cloud Computing Business and I heard the same sentiments echoed after two decades that poor data connectivity thorough the internet beyond 50 miles outside of Bangalore city was pathetic and hampers cloud computing deployment. This was in the IT capital of India, what a shame.
Without assured broadband connectivity which is reliable and effective roll out of cloud computing pan India is doomed. Though DOT may have laid the cables up to every district headquarters in India and will subsequently cover it to the taluk level with an investment of about Rs. 2000 crores, the issue of access to the internet in the last mile continues to be a challenge as it was in 1991.
I remember in 1991 we had 500 dial up lines with MTNL Delhi, and about 250 dial up lines in Chennai, Bangalore , Ahmedabad and other cities just to make sure that our brokers could route through the overlay X.25 network, but the design and execution could not deliver the desired connectivity and the exchange buckled under poor network infrastructure.
I see the same writing on the wall for cloud computing in India, without a robust internet connectivity there cannot be deployment of cloud computing in India. RIP advantage cloud India.
It is time to focus on cloud computing delivery and back end support to countries which have a robust internet backbone connecting most of the population, one of the countries that meets this criteria is the USA and it is no surprise that cloud adoption and growth is exponential in that country.
LS Subramanian is a cloud evangelist who believes "The Future
of Computing is the Cloud", he is the founder president of NISE.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the
author
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India's cloud policy needs new jurisdiction and security regulations
Two months after the government of India adopted Meghraj, a GI cloud policy and strategy with a clear roadmap, there are many issues that persist in terms of cloud services in the country.
Jurisdiction, data security, cross-border data flow, and data location are complicated issues that need to be addressed at an early stage. The government has set up a working group in the Department of Electronics and Information Technology to look into the matter.
Headed by Infosys co-founder, Kris Gopalakrishnan, the group has an onerous task ahead. Despite an improvement over last year's ranking, India is still ranked a modest 17 among 24 countries by the BSA Global Computing Scorecard 2013 in terms of policy environment. Polices that address matters around security, privacy, and compliance are urgently required to accelerate cloud adoption in India.
Gopalakrishnan, who has also taken over the reins as president of the Confederation of Indian Industry for 2013 through 2014, is confident that the cloud presents a real opportunity to take giant strides towards the resolution of the nation's pressing problems. Writing for InformationWeek, he says the cloud could well be the next big opportunity for Indian exports, a vital parameter of the nation's economic health.
So, what are the challenges India still faces with the cloud? First and foremost is the question of sovereignty and jurisdiction over data in the cloud. While most countries believe that the local law at the place of storage of data should apply, jurisdictional issues and varying government expectations may make that difficult.
Governments may exert pressure via licensing or operational restrictions on intermediate service providers. At times, the location of the principal place of business also comes into focus. In the case of India, compliance with the new rules under the amended Information Technology Act, 2000, requires providers of sensitive information to verify the information -- this may become onerous given that data may be held in fragmented corners of the cloud.
According to the law firm Amarchand Mangaldas quoted in this CII-KPMG report, the development of bi- and multi-lateral privacy frameworks, such as the Safe Harbor Framework developed by the EU and the United States to govern the transfer and storage of data, has become a major compliance standard for company privacy policies in the two nations. The global nature of the cloud architecture has also led to calls for an international regulatory body or treaty aimed at harmonizing regulations across countries. The OECD is also working on developing international standards for security and privacy.
If a cloud service provider decides to locate and store data in datacenters in the country it operates, much of the jurisdictional issues may be solved. But with the majority of the servers located in the US and Europe, cloud infrastructure is far from globalized. In a survey, global consultancy firm Cushman & Wakefield has found that India is the second-most risk-prone location globally for hosting global datacenters.
The Data Centre Risk Index 2013 identifies risks likely to affect the successful operation of datacenter facilities in the 30 most important global markets. While India was ranked high on parameters like cost of labor and sustainability, it was ranked moderately on political stability and global bandwidth, but scored low on factors like energy cost, ease of doing business, natural disasters, energy security, corporation tax, and education level.
On the other hand, law enforcement is not any easier with access to a physical server. The fragmented nature of data storage means information may be physically spread out and must be reassembled before it can be usable. This calls for cooperation of the cloud provider in the reassembly and delivery of the usable data. To unlock encrypted data, consent of the encryption key holder (often the information provider) is necessary.
Data storage is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to compliance issues around cloud deployments. Ownership of data, security of data during transmission, and retention and privacy are other issues fraught with risk in cloud computing. India will need to speed up the process of policy making to make the cloud more attractive. Read More
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Can cloud adoption usher in a new era in the banking sector?
One of the best examples of government policy impacting private and public sector business is that of the Indian banking sector. When the government decided to liberalize the economy in 1991, it revolutionized the Indian banking system. Overnight, the era of modern innovation and computerization was ushered in as Indian banks were encouraged to use new technologies in order to stay relevant to their customers in the face of competition from their International counterparts.
Previously banks had invested scarcely in infrastructure and branches were largely not connected or automated and technology was neither secure nor reliable. Data on transactions made would take several weeks to reflect in the main data center and the branch manager was the owner and custodian of all data and could do anything with it.
The Indian banking sector has come a long way from its initial technology adoption: a report by Zinnov Consultants titled ‘IT adoption in the BFSI sector in India’ states that percentage of IT spends by the sector on modernization have moved up significantly from 10 percent to 35 percent since 2008. More banks are moving up the growth curve from core banking applications to mobility and electronic payment solutions and targeted business-focused solutions such as loan management and treasury solutions as well as cloud clouting. The study further states that the key drivers for technology adoption were regulatory compliance needs, desire to improve efficiencies to better align with business processes, support for growth strategies such as Internet and mobile banking, enhanced customer experience for competitive differentiation and the desire to extend banking reach to untapped markets and population.
Cloud, virtualization and business intelligence solutions are becoming ever more essential to the future growth of the sector as it continues to struggle with security threats from consumerization of IT, shrinking IT budgets, mounting competition and customer expectations and tighter compliance requirements. With these major challenges needing technology intervention, the banking sector finds a need to proactively identify areas of concern and address them accordingly with cutting-edge deployments.
• Workload management: With IT adoption, banks today are able to provide 24X7 services to customers with strategic IT trends like cloud, virtualization and mobility playing a critical role in ensuring information availability to customers and the organization round the clock. The resulting challenge of managing workload at every point in time needs preemptive measures. Banks need to install dependable IT infrastructure that is scalable and secure and helps up customer satisfaction by making information and services available whenever necessary, aptly and accurately.
• Out-of-the-box support for major banking applications: Innovative implementations of core banking, financial inclusion projects and guidelines on operational automation have become inevitable. This advancement helps banks facilitate value added services to its customers, besides helping to maintain the bulk volume of financial transactions and construct a wide range of data warehousing to enable banks to construct, develop and maintain a complete data base of the customer and hence develop a stronger customer relationship.
• Automated disaster recovery (DR) and high availability: As organizations of all sizes move to the cloud, so do cyber-attackers. Under such circumstances, banks need to prevent incidents of data thieves trying to gain access to the bank's network, as well as be especially vigilant against new and varied threats aimed to steal sensitive data. Furthermore social, mobile and cloud computing have emerged as essential for next generation services in the vertical and the traction increased for cloud/ virtualization and business intelligence solutions has increased. So the sector now needs an enterprise backup and recovery solution that performs fast and secures back-ups while optimizing storage.
Secondly, banks are under an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of a client's data. In India, the confidentiality obligations with regard to client data have evolved from the common law principles of implied contract. Banks therefore, require integrated products that protect virtual and physical environments, simplify both backup and disaster recovery, and offer unmatched recovery capabilities whether from tape, disk, snap shot or cloud.
• Multi-cluster and multi-site management: Lastly, it is also important that banks store, manage, and discover unstructured information across locations; along with de-duplicate information at the source to reduce costs. Deletion of information confidently and discovering information efficiently is something that they need to be able to do. Another important aspect that banks need to keep in mind is, to adopt solutions that discover, protect against loss and theft, comply with global data privacy laws and safeguard their reputation and manage confidential data wherever it is stored or used.
The confidentiality of information in the cloud is a cornerstone of successful cloud solutions. Money is not always the primary goal in cyber-attacks against banks and financial institutions. A data breach incident can have a significant impact on their reputation amongst customers, employees and the industry. Banks therefore, need a centralized management console, with the necessary tools and systems to enable their IT staff to exercise control over every bit of information that is stored on the cloud.
The author is Managing Director- Sales, India and SAARC, Symantec
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Eurocopter, Ramco ink partnership to offer cloud-based maintenance information systems for helicopters
Eurocopter announced its global partnership with Ramco Systems, the global Aviation Software provider on cloud, mobile and tablets.
Both companies will join forces to offer state-of-the-art helicopter maintenance software, which will ease the life of operators and maintenance centers.
This partnership agreement, formally signed at the 2013 Paris Air Show, enables Eurocopter and Ramco Systems to offer additional mobility and functionality for the collection and treatment of maintenance, repairs and overhaul MRO-related data, thereby providing highly effective and cost-efficient fleet management services that are affordable and user friendly for all operators, including those with smaller numbers of helicopters.
“Ramco’s cloud-based maintenance software solution is an outstanding addition to our service offering,” said Matthieu Louvot, Senior Vice President of Support and Services. “The partnership will bring us closer to our customers’ maintenance operations, enabling us to offer them the best quality of service.”
Commenting on the global partnership, P. R. Venketrama Raja, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, Ramco Systems, said “The strength and capability of our Aviation solution gets a global endorsement with Eurocopter, the number one civil and parapublic helicopter manufacturer, choosing Ramco for its functionality, cloud-based solution with mobility, new user interface and role-based WorkSpaces. Ramco Aviation on Cloud is modular which makes it user friendly for small and large operators.”
With tens of thousands of parts in an aircraft, tracking and managing each stage of maintenance work would become unmanageable without a user friendly and comprehensive M&E/ MRO solution. The Ramco-Eurocopter cloud based MRO software addresses the unique needs of smaller Operators, MROs and CAMOs, which until now had to either run on disparate point solutions or operate manually using paper/ excel to track maintenance and manage safety and regulatory compliance.
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How SoCloMo is changing the enterprise security landscape
Imagine the bygone era when neither smart mobile devices nor cloud computing were commonplace. Back then, typically a day in the life of an employee would begin at 9 am in the morning —when the employee logged on to his desktop and would end by 6 pm in the evening — when the employee logged out of his desktop and left the office. Till the employee reported back to the office next morning, he wouldn’t have access to official mails or any other work-related communication, unless he had a workstation installed at home.
In those times for ensuring security, all that the CIOs had to do was focus on building a secure digital fortress around their in-house enterprise IT infrastructure, which included servers, network architecture and the employee PC stations all of which were on-premise and hence easy to monitor and control within the physical walls of the enterprise.
Cut to today, when corporate-owned Windows PCs stationed within office premises are no longer the only option for the employees as each of them owns one or more mobile computing device, which they carry everywhere.
Owing to the ubiquity and affordability of mobile devices along with 2G and 3G connectivity, the employees no longer have to wait till they reach their office to login into their official mails. In fact, mobility coupled with SaaS solutions and social media enables them to not only read e-mails — both private and official — on their smart mobile devices but also allows them to access enterprise apps like corporate CRM while on the move and store the corporate data on their mobile computing devices.
Social, cloud computing and mobility (SoCloMo) has broken open the rigid limits of enterprise IT that was so far stationed within the four walls of the enterprise. Today, enterprise IT has evolved from a controlled, in-house environment where CIOs could easily keep their confidential information away from any unauthorized access to a scenario where CIOs are worried about the security of their corporate data that is distributed across cloud, mobile and social platforms, where enterprise IT neither has any visibility nor any control.
If proper security layers are not built, SoCloMo can serve as a highly vulnerable entry point for cyber criminals, using which they can exploit the enterprise IT environment. “Leakage of corporate data via the usage of SoCloMo by the employees brings in huge opportunities for target attackers and Advanced Persistent Threat attackers to unleash their social engineering techniques and then make use of zero-day exploits. Apart from this, SoCloMo may also expose the company to security threats that range from phishing, identity thefts, cross-site scripting, authentication compromise, injection flaws and information leakages,” says Sanjay Katkar, Co-Founder and CTO, Quick Heal Technologies.
Leakage of corporate data via the usage of SoCloMo by the employees brings in huge opportunities for target attackers and APT attackers
Sanjay Katkar, Co-Founder and CTO, Quick Heal Technologies
Growing use of SoCloMo is necessitating a radical change in the manner CIOs traditionally approached threat vectors within an enterprise. CISOs/CIOs today devise fresh strategies to ensure security of corporate data as they are faced with the challenge to secure information across multiple devices and platforms.
“New-generation CISOs/CIOs are facing huge security challenges due to rapid growth in the volume and variety of information across multiple devices, platforms and infrastructure, increased connectivity to third-parties, as well as pressures of evolving cyber-attack mechanism,” says Anand Naik, Managing Director-Sales, India & SAARC, Symantec.
Naik further informs that according to the industry reports, CIOs globally are now spending more than one full day a week exclusively on IT security, that too during a period where organizations are already doing more with less.
New-generation CISOs are facing huge security challenges due to rapid growth in the volume and variety of information across multiple devices and platforms
Anand Naik, Managing Director-Sales, India & SAARC, Symantec
There is no doubt about the fact that the usage of SoCloMo offers a number of advantages to the enterprise. However, security issues with corporate data travelling through these channels, where IT doesn’t have any direct control, robs a CIO’s peace of mind.
Let’s take a look at how each of these technologies is changing the enterprise security landscape.
SECURITY RISKS IN BYOD ERA
In today’s time enterprise mobility is bringing in unbelievable ROI for many Indian enterprises. Also, today’s web-savvy youth is actually looking at BYOD as a perk while choosing a particular job. Not to mention, the growing demand of the already employed staff to be given access to enterprise apps on their personal devices.
Several benefits of enterprise mobility like increased employee productivity and better collaboration coupled with increasing employee demand is pressurizing the CIOs to open up the closed enterprise architecture. However, many CIOs are holding back from freely rolling out BYOD, considering the security threats it brings in.
There are many reports that prove that apprehensions that CIOs have are indeed not in vain. For example, according to Symantec’s Mobility Survey 2013, 72 percent of Indian businesses have faced mobility incidents in the past 12 months, causing revenue loss of 37 percent.
Highlighting some of the key security threats that mobility introduces in the enterprise environment, Naik says, “The biggest nightmare associated with mobility is that the company data flows into a variety of mobile devices and applications, many of which are not built to meet enterprise standards. Supporting mobility while keeping data safe and secure is daunting and requires new approaches.”
BYOD is thus clearly introducing security management issues for CIOs around access control, data protection and compliance, compelling them to re-think their security strategies.
“The practice of unsecured and possibly non-compliant mobile devices easily coming inside the walls and leaving with business sensitive information, is forcing organizations to re-think how to best secure their business data,” adds Srinivasa Boggaram, Team Lead PreSales - India and SAARC, McAfee India.
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SECURITY CONCERNS WITH CLOUD COMPUTING
Another important security issue, which has been changing the traditional security landscape of enterprises is the emergence of public cloud computing services where the corporate data pushed into the public cloud sits within the vendor’s servers and not within the enterprise’s server. This means that the enterprise IT doesn’t have any direct control over the company-owned data apart from the legal guidelines mentioned in the SLAs signed with the cloud solution provider.
Amit Saha, Practice Engagement Manager, Enterprise Security & Risk Management Services, Cloud, Infosys asserts that CIOs are skeptical about public cloud services due to security concerns. Co-location of data with other cloud tenants, virtualization breaches, inability to enforce enterprise security controls, lack of security controls visibility, and difficulty in securing applications and interfaces are some of the key concerns CIOs perceive in relation to public cloud services, he says. Owing to the security concerns, Indian enterprises have largely been resorting to the public cloud services for hosting their non-critical applications.
Another major security threat from cloud computing arises when an employee resorts to certain public cloud services without consulting the IT team. For example, take the case of a sales manager, who signs his department up for Salesforce without consulting IT or the marketing team or shares certain important launch materials with associated vendors via an unauthorized Dropbox account. In either case the employees has put sensitive information into the cloud without organizational oversight and in turn exposed the corporate data to vulnerabilities.
Symantec’s ‘Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud Survey 2013’ report, refers to such public cloud services and applications, which are not authorized by the government or by the company’s IT system, as ‘rogue clouds’. According to the survey, such rogue clouds are prevalent in 90 percent of Indian organizations — both enterprises and SMBs — and can cause security breaches by means of exposure of information, account takeover issues, defacement of web properties, theft of information, etc.
Elaborating on the security issues rogue clouds can lead to Symantec’s Naik says, “Many employees synchronize their devices with at least one public cloud-based service, as well as home computers. This can leave sensitive data stored in insecure locations; not to mention the risks associated with corporate e-mail being sent through personal accounts and file sharing services.”
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKED SECURITY THREATS
Apart from BYOD and cloud computing, social media is one of the major challenges that CIOs grapple with, as accessing social media platforms is one of the most frequent activities that the employees do for business, and for personal needs they use a combination of IT-assigned and personally owned devices.
Key threat associated with social media is that sometimes employees share confidential data unknowingly on social networking platforms, which pose a danger of targeted attacks to organizations. “Confidential corporate information can be inadvertently made public by negligent or unaware employees on social networking sites. The availability of private information on the public domain help cyber attackers craft targeted attacks. Spearphishing attacks leverage such data to craft personalized e-mails to targets specific individuals within the organization,” says Naik.
Apart from this, in case an employee clicks on a malicious link on a social networking site, his system and credentials may get compromised with malware that could log keystrokes, take screenshots and steal information. “When an employee falls victim, he leaves the entire corporate network — and the data on it — vulnerable to exploits,” states Naik.
This particular security risk becomes even more complex when one takes into consideration that many employees access social networks from personal devices, which may be less secure than corporate devices.
The root of social media-related enterprise security threat is primarily the lack of awareness of the employees.
Citing an example, Srinivas S Tadigadapa, Director of Enterprise Solutions Sales, Intel South Asia, explains, “An employee in his ignorance or sometime in his enthusiasm can post something, which can disclose the confidential information of the company. For example, a simple update saying “excited about the launch of game changing X product on Y date” or “frustrated with an issue with X product,” might disclose the information, which is still confidential and can result in heavy losses to the organization and to the employee.”
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MANAGING SoCloMo SECURITY CHALLENGES
CIOs are fast realizing that if SoCloMo is not wrapped in the right kind of security solutions, it can lead to fresh enterprise threat vectors. So CIOs are now gearing up to fight the evolving cybercrime landscape by building a robust integrated security solutions approach.
Let’s look at some of the security solutions that are making themselves relevant for the enterprises in fighting against security threats posed by SoCloMo.
SECURING BYOD
To achieve productivity gains of BYOD without compromising on security, enterprises should build a robust policy before rolling out BYOD within the enterprise. Organizations should choose an appropriate unified Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution that can administer, control and provide visibility into a variety of employee devices such as multi-vendor desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, e-readers; diverse kinds of enterprise users (employees, contractors and visitors); and a variety of network segments (LAN, WLAN, WAN).
Apart from MDM, there are many other security layers that organizations need to look at before rolling out BYOD. McAfee’s Boggaram elaborates that BYOD needs to be looked at from different dimensions like DLP, network access control, authentication system, internal intrusion prevention systems, internal firewalls, securing Wi-Fi etc.
“On top of all, is the internal IT policy, which should be detailed and fool-proof to drive the initiative, guide effectively and prevent failure of specific tools,” he adds.
Along with MDM, centralized security controls are emerging as popular solutions for enterprises to help them address BYOD security threats. “Centralized security controls such as secure API gateway and federation (supporting OAuth , OpenID, etc.) are today making themselves highly relevant to effectively address BYOD security threats and also integrate seamlessly with social media,” says Saha of Infosys.
Today, centralized security controls are increasingly becoming relevant to effectively address BYOD security threats
Amit Saha, Practice Engagement Manager, Enterprise Security & Risk Management Services, Cloud, Infosys
Apart from these solutions an interesting concept that is emerging in the context of BYOD is that of containerization of the user-owned device into two logical partitions — one that is controlled by the enterprise (which the employee uses for official purposes) and the other that is owned by the user (which he/she uses for their personal purposes). The biggest advantage that this concept brings in is that the corporate data cannot be copied in any way to the personal container of the device. And in case the device is stolen or the employee leaves the organization, the IT team can conveniently administer a remote wipe of the enterprise controlled container, thus ensuring the security of corporate data.
An example of this is BlackBerry’s Balance technology, which creates two logical partitions of the device: a corporate partition that is used by the employee to purely access enterprise apps and do official work and the personal partition, which is used by the employee for personal usage. Here only the corporate partition is controlled by IT and the employee is free to use the personal partition with privacy.
A similar solution is being advocated by VMWare, called VMWare Horizon Workspace, which enables enterprises to securely provision and manage a corporate mobile workspace on employees’ Android smartphones, which would be in complete isolation from their personal environment.
ADDRESSING CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY RISKS
CIOs have been debating the data security risks associated with hosting enterprise data on a third-party server while availing cloud services. Of late, many cloud solution providers are trying to get security certifications to assure the security of their platforms to the users. “Cloud providers are starting to adopt security frameworks and certifications such as ISO27001, SAS 70, PCI certification, etc.,” says Saha of Infosys.
Also, enterprises themselves are trying to make the whole transaction over the public cloud as secure as possible by deploying security solutions at their end. “Enterprises are looking at means to extend typical security controls such as firewalls, IDS/IPS, anti-virus, web filtering, privilege user management, integrated logging and event correlation, etc. into infrastructure of the cloud providers and ensure grounds-up security. In addition, (federated) identity and access management platforms are being integrated with cloud providers to ensure tighter control over access along with enterprises also integrating security controls such as data tokenization to secure sensitive data co-located at even the SaaS provider’s end,” adds Saha.
COMBATING SOCIAL MEDIA THREATS
To battle social media-related threats, it is extremely important to caution employees from sharing any corporate data online and educating them to refrain from clicking on any malicious link when they are logged into social media.
McAfee’s Boggaram says that companies should provide best practices to arm employees with the tools they need to be productive and safe. He also asserts on the importance of using technology that can block dangerous links and applications. “Robust solutions must be deployed to make sure that web gateway architecture protects users when they access web content and scans active elements in real time. Reporting web activity is also important to understand how organizations use the web, helping them to comply with regulations, identifying trends, isolating problems, documenting inappropriate web activity, and tailoring filtering settings to best enforce web usage policies,” he says.
With evolving threats linked to SoCloMo becoming a reality amongst enterprises, CIOs also need to focus on designing a next-generation security architecture built on top of a multi-function platform, with deep network integration. CIOs need to adopt an integrated, adaptive, and collaborative security approach built into the concept of a self-defending network, which should remain active at all times.
Stressing on the need for network-centric approach, Diwakar Dayal, Lead- Security Business, Cisco India and SAARC says, “CIOs need to evaluate solutions that offer a holistic security policy, where controls can be applied securely to a device and location agnostic network. These controls should perform inconspicuously, minimize propagation of attacks and quickly respond to as-yet unknown attacks. These capabilities can reduce vulnerability of networks, minimize the impact of attacks, and improve overall infrastructure availability and reliability.”
Resonating the same thought, Sajan Paul, Director, Systems Engineering, Juniper Networks says, “In order to guard today’s dynamic IT environments against the new threat paradigms, organizations need to manage networking and security in an integrated fashion, which requires broad integration across all networking and security functions.”
In order to counter threats posed by SoCloMO, Sundar Ram, Vice President, Technology Sales Consulting Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific stresses on the importance of business support for IT security initiatives. “Data security only works if it is backed through executive support. The business needs to help determine what protection levels should be attached to data stored on cloud or accessed through personal devices or on social platforms. Often, business users are not familiar with the risks associated with data security. Beyond IT solutions, what is needed is a well-engaged and knowledgeable organization to help make security a reality,” he says.
Today, SoCloMo is prevalent in enterprises across the globe and it would be absolutely impossible for the CIOs to resist these emerging trends from entering into their enterprise for too long. Sooner or later every enterprise will have to gear up its enterprise security architecture to accommodate SoCloMo, since the benefits that they can bring in to the business far outweighs the security hassles that the CIOs might be contemplating as of now.
Looking at the heightened interest, security vendors, device manufacturers and even virtualization solution providers are coming out with interesting solutions that can help CIOs incorporate SoCloMo within the enterprise architecture. It is actually the right time for CIOs to look within their IT infrastructure and evaluate which solutions would enable their company to accommodate SoCloMo in the best possible way.
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3 roles for tape in the cloud
Questions about the usefulness of tape come up often in conversations with users and vendors. The general theory, especially by cloud storage vendors, is that tape has outlived its usefulness.
The reality is that it has not; in fact, I often make the case that tape is actually more useful than it has ever been, especially in the cloud.
Here are three uses for tape in the cloud today.
1. Cloud Seeding.
Tape is an ideal way to "seed" a cloud. Seeding is getting the initial data to the cloud storage facility. Instead of transferring data across an Internet connection for days or weeks, it can be copied to tape and sent to the cloud provider via an overnight truck. If it will take you longer than 24 hours to seed a cloud via WAN transfer, then tape should be considered.
2. Cloud Recovery.
Tape also is a useful way to restore data from the cloud. Although an increasing number of cloud backup providers provide in-cloud disaster recovery, at some point you will want your server and its data back in your data center. With cloud disaster recovery you can run your application in the cloud so that you can return to operations quickly, but it is still not in your facility -- and you probably want it there.
While you are running the application in their data center, the provider can send you your data on tape, which you can recover quickly on premises. The final step would be a cloud quick sync of data, updating the data that came in on tape with data that changed while it was in transit.
Some cloud backup companies with this cloud disaster recovery capability claim they have eliminated the concern over recovery time. After all, if your application is up and running in the cloud, who cares how long it takes for your data to sync back down to the local data center?
Obviously there is a reason you want that data and that application back in your data center; otherwise, you would just leave it in the cloud permanently. This is typically either a performance concern or a security concern. If those are issues, the faster you can have that data in your data center the better. As with the initial seed, if you can't restore the data set in a single overnight WAN bandwidth window, then tape is the better option.
3. Cloud Deep Archive.
For example, we use a cloud service to share files between analysts at Storage Switzerland. I want two things from one of these services that none offer as far as I know. First, not related to this subject, I want them to hard sync the most active data -- modified within the last week -- to my iPad so I don't have to count on an Internet connection always being available.
Second and more on subject, I want them to archive older data that I don't need immediate access to and lower my costs or increase my capacity. That archive could be to tape. The net result would be an infrastructure that would allow me to store, cost effectively, terabytes of information in the cloud.
As you can see, tape can play several roles in the cloud. It can help with movement between on-premises and cloud-based storage systems and it can help lower costs. Providers that embrace these capabilities will have a significant advantage over those that do not.
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‘Cloud is influencing a tremendous rise in entrepreneurial activities across the world’: Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
Amazon has been a pioneer in cloud and has inspired several other companies to take the cloud route. Can you take us through the initial years when cloud computing was a relatively unknown phenomenon?
After
over a decade of building and running the highly scalable web
application, Amazon.com, the company realized that it had developed a
core competency in operating massive scale technology infrastructure and
data centers, and embarked on a much broader mission of serving a new
customer segment — developers and businesses — with a platform of web
services they can use to build (and be paid for) sophisticated, scalable
applications. In 2006, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”), an Amazon.com
company, officially began offering customers access to in-the-cloud
infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology
platform.
Before AWS launched in
2006, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of
building their own infrastructure or contract with a vendor for a fixed
amount of data center capacity that they might or might not use. This
choice either meant paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that
the amount of capacity they forecasted was insufficient to keep pace
with their growth. Businesses spent time and money managing their own
data centers or a co-location facility, which meant time not spent on
growing their actual business or differentiating their offering for
customers.
The platform of technology infrastructure services that comprise AWS has grown rapidly since the launch of the first service since March 2006. Innovation continues after the services are launched as AWS continues to listen to customers and consistently add new features, updates and additional services at a fast pace. Much like its parent company Amazon.com, AWS is focused on running its business efficiently and passing the cost savings along to customers. As AWS has grown, it continues to use its scale to operate more efficiently and lower prices for customers.
The platform of technology infrastructure services that comprise AWS has grown rapidly since the launch of the first service since March 2006. Innovation continues after the services are launched as AWS continues to listen to customers and consistently add new features, updates and additional services at a fast pace. Much like its parent company Amazon.com, AWS is focused on running its business efficiently and passing the cost savings along to customers. As AWS has grown, it continues to use its scale to operate more efficiently and lower prices for customers.
What were some of the early experiences from companies — specifically developers?
When
we first started AWS in 2006, many developer customers and startups
were among the early adopters. Our developer customers wanted the
flexibility to build their applications the way they want to — they
didn’t want to be locked into a particular programming model, language,
or operating system. The developers aren’t forced to use our entire
suite of services — they can use one or any combination of the AWS
services, it’s their choice. They aren’t limited to a set amount of
storage, bandwidth, or computing resources —they can use as much or as
little as they wish, and only pay for what they use. So, developers can
use AWS for virtually anything — from full web applications, batch
processing to simple storage. Hence, AWS has helped level the playing
field for developers and startup companies to leverage AWS to build
their businesses and compete in the global market. Many of the early
adopters in India have grown quickly and successfully, including
Hungama, redBus, Kuliza, Druva, Excelsoft, Greytip among many others.
How
has Amazon’s technology evolved over the past few years? What kind of
planning goes into designing an IT infrastructure that ensures that
Amazon is well positioned to drive technology trends that define the
future of the cloud?
One of the reasons we believe companies are adopting these services so quickly is because of our rapid innovation based on customer feedback. Our process is to release a service that is useful to a lot of people, get customer feedback and rapidly add the enhanced or new features based in large part on what customers want and need from the services. There’s really no substitute for the accelerated learning we’ve had from working with hundreds of thousands of customers with every imaginable use case.
We are also relentless about driving efficiencies and passing along the cost savings to our customers. We’ve lowered our prices 27 times since 2006 without any competitive pressure. Amazon is very comfortable with running high volume, low margin businesses which is very different from other traditional IT vendors.
Your perspective on how cloud services have transformed the IT landscape? What has been the impact on the developer, the enterprise and the service provider?
Here are a few examples that illustrate how cloud has transformed the IT landscape and its impact:
Can you give us an insight into Amazon’s IT infrastructure, its complexity and the scale?
Here a few things that we can share publicly that gives you an idea of the scale:
- In
a traditional physical environment, a typical approach would involve
signing multiple years of contracts that are locked in with traditional
IT vendors or service providers, co-location facilities, or even
building new data centers for disaster recovery. It’s hard to swallow
the outlay of time and huge capital required for set up and maintenance
when, under normal circumstances, this infrastructure is under-utilized
and hugely over-provisioned. Importantly, it is hard to predict if these
long-term commitments will work accordingly when disaster strikes and
meanwhile, you have been paying for the upfront commitment of this
disaster recovery infrastructure year-after-year under uncertainty.
Disaster recovery implementation in the cloud is much cost effective and
simpler than traditional disaster recovery solutions. You can
completely automate the process and bring up an entire cloud environment
within minutes. The beauty of having a business continuity strategy
implemented in the cloud is that it automatically gives you higher
availability across different geographic regions without any major
modifications in deployment and data replication strategies. You have
the flexibility of implementing disaster recovery measures with fine
grain control that meet your users and line-of-business requirement. For
example, you can select which sets of data or applications, for which
business divisions, at which locations and determine its uptime
depending on its criticality. You can fine-tune them anytime according
to the changing business conditions. You can even test and create mock
disaster scenarios in the cloud very easily.
- Vast
amount of data exists in organizations which continues to grow in leaps
and bounds. In today’s competitive environment, effectively leveraging
large scale data can be critical to business success. Data can uncover
deep insights about customer behavior, help improve quality and cost of
operations, drive innovative product features, and ultimately increase
the bottom line. With the cloud, businesses can roll out hundreds or
thousands of servers, even those with high performance computing power,
in a matter of minutes and pay for what they actually use. They are able
to store huge amount of data at a very low cost in the cloud. This
helps businesses drive down costs significantly, while enabling them to
analyze enormous amount of data quickly, giving businesses, researchers,
analysts and developers the competitive advantage. Through the cloud,
data analytics is no longer the purview of large enterprises. Every
young business launching today knows they must integrate data collection
and analytics from the start. In order to compete in today’s market;
these companies must have a deep understanding of their customers’
behavior, allowing them to continuously improve how they serve them.
Launching a business with a minimally viable product and then rapidly
iterating in the direction that customers lead them is becoming a
standard approach to success. However, this cannot be done without
efficient, scalable data analytics. The cloud has leveled the playing
field to allow organizations of all sizes to compete in the Big Data
arena.
- We are also seeing tremendous rise in entrepreneurial activities across the world. Many startups are driving hard to innovate and get their product in the hands of customers at neck breaking speeds. For example, with millions of smartphone users worldwide and multitude of applications, mobile developers and the businesses they serve need scalable infrastructure to develop and host the backend services. With the cloud, mobile developers are no longer worried about managing infrastructure resources, which is often either not their core competence or they simply don’t want to spend time on it. They are now able to focus on building sophisticated, scalable products and accelerating them to the market. In addition, mobile developers are able to leverage the prowess of the cloud for fast, complex processing of their application services before delivering the presentation layer across multiple form factors and devices to ensure great user experience. Realistically, not all products or applications will be an immediate runaway success and some innovations will take time to reach their full potential. The cloud provides a low cost way for engineers, product developers and even marketing folks to experiment new ideas and test feasibility within a short timeframe so that they can quickly move forward with successful ones. Cloud has revolutionized and sped up an organization’s application development cycle, encouraging innovation and creativity.
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Can you give us an insight into Amazon’s IT infrastructure, its complexity and the scale?
Here a few things that we can share publicly that gives you an idea of the scale:
- AWS platform includes more than 30 different services in categories like storage, compute, databases, deployment and management, content delivery, messaging, monitoring among others. Customers can choose any combination of services that best meet their needs.
- Every day, AWS adds enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a USD 5 billion enterprise (circa 2003).
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores more than 1 trillion objects and regularly peaks at 835,000 requests per second.
- AWS doubled its global region footprint in the year 2011 and is available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. We have a total of 9 AWS Regions around the world.
AWS has hundreds of thousands of customers in over 190 countries from startups, small-to-medium companies, large enterprises, educational institutions and government agencies. More than 300 government agencies and 1,500 academic institutions worldwide are using AWS.
Here are some examples of how our customers are using AWS to save costs and increase their business agility:
Samsung uses the AWS platform of technology infrastructure services to build its Smart Hub application. The Smart Hub application allows users of Smart TV and Blu-ray players to access content of third-party providers. With every user’s request, Smart Hub application authenticates devices, delivers apps and content, pushes notifications across multiple devices. Samsung’s cloud deployment strategy has saved CAPEX by USD 34 million and reduced OPEX by 85 percent. If Samsung were to use the traditional on-premise data center, it would have spent USD 34 million dollars in hardware and maintenance expenses during the first two years.
Within Unilever, the Research and Development department includes over 6,000 specialists stationed in 20 countries throughout the world. Unilever Research and Development recently began an e-Science program that runs on AWS. The program uses AWS to do genomic research and compare the genetic diversity of healthy and unhealthy genes to develop new products. For example, comparing a healthy mouth with one with gingivitis by identifying the shared genes amongst these two can be very helpful in developing the next generation of toothpaste. By using AWS, Unilever is able to reduce its research and development time and speed up innovation. Gene analysis now takes hours, instead of weeks, and the company has increased productivity five-fold.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has sent a robot to every planet in the solar system and relies on AWS as an integral part of its missions. The Mars Exploration Rover continuously generates large volumes of data that JPL processes, analyzes and stores on AWS from the control room in Pasadena, Calif.
How do you see the future of the cloud? What new capabilities or innovations can we expect in the next five years?
Cloud Computing has brought significant positive change in both IT and businesses. We have seen initiatives by individual business units in enterprises that are no longer taking ‘no’ for an answer as the cloud-based infrastructure services are easily accessible by those who want to experiment new ideas or push new frontier for the company. We are seeing a shift in IT, driven largely by business units that embrace cloud services, to break away decades of old practice and mindset in order to stay relevant in the new world of the cloud:
- IT as a business enabler: The IT department now wants to be seen as an enabler of innovation. The cloud frees IT resources from the heavy lifting of the undifferentiated infrastructure, supports innovation and allows them to focus on business-critical activities. Just look at the change that is happening at the CIO level — most of the CIOs have always wanted to have a seat at the board. But in the old world of traditional IT, they were more focused on cutting costs and were perceived as the blocker to innovation, instead of an enabler. The radical change that cloud brings for CIOs is that they can now be the enabler for innovation and can be seen as an essential business partner, to help companies move forward.
- New licensing models: The transparency of price structure and flexibility offered by cloud computing today has led to transformative change. It’s now about putting the buyer (the customers) back at the driver’s seat. In the new world, customers do not want a forced lock-in by any vendors. Today, cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) allow anyone to access any combination of services at a transparent pricing structure via multiple platforms, multiple programming languages, and multiple operating systems; companies can grow and shrink the usage quickly based on business requirements, and pay for what they actually consume — because flexibility is what customer wants.
- The consumerization of IT: In the consumer world, decisions about technology are often based on functionalities, offered at a price and speed that they want. In short, the consumers are in charge. New workforce and leaders embracing this new technology infrastructure come from this world where they have been in full control of their technology resources; thus compelling enterprise IT to adapt to the new world. To remain relevant, CIOs are now beginning to take control — they want the ability to choose what they want, when they want it and how much they are willing to pay. For example, they will demand that licensing models meet their expectations rather than that of the vendors. There is also a change happening in enterprise IT, being influenced by the richness of apps experience available in the consumer world, which makes the old world of enterprise IT looks like old science fiction. Cloud is enabling quicker apps development, better integration of services with mobile devices and growing consumer apps. Ultimately we will see an assimilation of consumer and enterprise IT, creating innovative services that are highly adaptable to changes, driving a whole new set of business opportunities, generating new revenue streams, which will largely be driven by cloud services.
- Customers are in control: In the new world, cloud providers like AWS are making it easy for customers to get either into or out of the cloud, giving customer the choices to pick any combination of services that best suits their needs. In short, the new world of IT puts customers in control. They have the ability to walk away easily if they’re not getting what they want, whether that’s in terms of features, performance, reliability or support.
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How Infosys is using cloud for infrastructure optimization
Infosys started using the cloud in mid-2008 primarily for automation and things around it. The basic focus was built around how Infosys can move closer to IT users, Infosys clients and its partner ecosystem. “It is about harvesting different cloud forms for developing and co-creating a concept including the go-to-market and one that is primarily focused on building the whole lifecycle,” says Muralikrishna K, VP and Head, Computers & Communication Division, Infosys.
In the last three years, Infosys invested close to USD 4 million on concept development and co-creation, which was very limited to hardware with some amount of software. Muralikrishna says that the investment would go up by another USD 4-5 million as the demand for cloud is really huge. “The key intention of implementing the cloud was security and experience, not cost. In terms of real estate, at one third the cost of the current data center, it enables to energize around 3,000 to 4,000 virtual server class machines.”
The company built an elaborate stack of three clouds: an internal cloud called MyCloud for development and collaboration; a Collab Cloud for the internal users and partners; and a production cloud called Datacenter Microcosm for clients. Infosys currently has 40 customers leveraging these products.
“MyCloud is a very Intranet-focused cloud, which enables us to easily develop 50 to 100 virtual servers in 15 minutes, provisioned and configured for projects with full control to start and stop the servers. It is completely integrated to our project management system and helps in identifying who is working on a particular project so that only that particular individual is given access. Collab Cloud is about how Infosys works with research bodies, customers, and technology partners where they actually co-create a database to share IP. Infosys does not allow any external resource to come into the network and develop this. Through Collab Cloud, Infosys has its own security card called INA Card where the IP is created and Infosys ensures how best it can be used. Finally, Datacenter Microcosm is a production cloud purposed to serve applications and solutions developed by various business units (Infosys IP), leveraging cloud deployment models, powering Infosys non-linear growth engines,” says Muralikrishna.
The cloud has resulted in an infrastructure optimization across the company. In terms of application, Infosys has migrated couple of applications to Microsoft Azure platform, including corporate applications, video conferencing, web conferencing and audio conferencing. It uses private cloud to host its CAPEX-intensive internal IT and hybrid cloud to host IT services for its partners. From a functional perspective, the development and test environment has been automated.
In terms of experience and adoption, Infosys achieved 85 percent utilization. In terms of power, Infosys has managed to save around 82 percent of the environment that is energized through the cloud modules.
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Big Data will grow past its hype by 2016: Gartner
Big Data will grow past its hype towards 2016 to become “just data” once the technologies mature, and organizations learn how to deal with it, according to Gartner, Inc. While data is regularly defined by the dimensions of volume, velocity and variety, information management concerns must be much broader.
“The bottom line is that not all information requires a Big Data approach,” said Frank Buytendijk, research vice president at Gartner. “The new “Big Data way’ is not going to replace all other forms of information management. There is more room - and need - for experimentation in the area of ‘information of innovation,’ for instance with social media data, or by making processes more information-centric.”
Buytendijk said that it’s important that organizations understand that Big Data isn't the only stream of innovation in information management. The industry is in the middle of what Gartner calls "The Nexus of Forces”, and it is in the combination mobile, social, cloud and information innovation where new opportunities arise.
Mobile has undoubtedly shaken up information dissemination. Knowledge workers expect to be able to connect to systems from anywhere at anytime and get information in the context of their situation. Content, analytics, reporting, all can be delivered "mobile." The user experience has become more fluid, when working on data using various devices – users can start a process on a desktop computer, use a tablet in interacting with a customer, and take some notes on a smartphone.
“Information management has gone ‘cross-platform content delivery’, and this line of innovation hasn't ended yet. For example, mobile devices offer location-based context to select the right data, and augmented reality and mashups,” said Buytendijk. “However, mobile content delivery is only a part of the impact on information management. Mobile devices will develop to become a prime source of data collection.”
Business analytics are moving forward at an astonishing rate. Yet, analytics are not limited to business use only. Increasingly, analytics will become available for consumers too. One example of this is the use of graph analysis, which helps determining rich relationships between data elements.
Sentiment analysis is another popular application. It is mainly used to inform companies on how they are viewed in the market, or for the benefit of advertisers. In addition to simple use cases like repository access to documents, many enterprise content management (ECM) vendors are developing interfaces for more specific use cases, such as participation in content review and approval processes; exception handling; camera-image and bar-code inputs; case management system interfaces; and the ability to maintain presence awareness of mobile users in an ECM system.
Cloud computing was first positioned as a way of turning capital expenses into operational expenses, while saving on cost of ownership and helping to grow a more scalable and agile information infrastructure. Then cloud started to support other styles of working, such as multi-tenancy which appeals to public sector organizations which are not competitive. They can use the same applications and information creating business processes and information sharing across organizational borders. Now, there are also examples of "information as a service," where applications can call other applications in the cloud to perform a task or deliver a crucial bit of information.
Turning that principle around, and allowing information to flow — albeit under certain conditions - cloud would turn into a "Bank of Information." “If we allow others to access some of our information, we receive interest,” Buytendijk said. “We get other information back, or more metadata on the use of our information by others. If we use information we don't own, we pay interest in the same way. In this way, exchange rates could develop, based on exchanging information.”
“The underlying message of all these examples is that information is an asset in its own right. It has value. Gartner calls this emerging discipline of valuating information "Infonomics.It is not something of the far future, in fact, this is happening today in various industries, in commerce and public sector, in large and small enterprises.”
However, Buytendijk underlined the fact that as exciting as all new business opportunities are, there are also reasons for concern. Concerning the ethics of Big Data, a recent Gartner Circle study showed that "governance and privacy" was the most important concern around Big Data – clearly there is a fine line between superior customer insight and being "creepy."
Similarly, from a technology point of view, managing information in the enterprise is a far from trivial matter. There is significant diversity in terms of the type of information, the use cases and the technologies involved. Furthermore, information and process are spilling over. These used to be fairly separate categories in IT, but now analytics and content are front and center in business processes. As a result, just as the finance organization manages money, and HR is responsible for intellectual capital, a new information organization may emerge, outside of IT, led by the Chief Data Officer (CDO). Gartner estimates that there are currently about 50 established CDOs out there already and expects this to grow to 20 percent of enterprises worldwide.
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Podar Education selects Ramco’s ERP on Cloud with HR and Talent Management
Ramco Systems, an enterprise software product company focused on delivering ERP on Cloud, Tablets and smartphones today announced Podar Group of Schools, an 86-year old leading Education Network as its customer. Podar has selected—Ramco’s ERP on Cloud with HR and Talent Management for its growing network of educational institutions across India, including a wide spectrum of brands for Pre-Primary, Primary & Secondary Schools, Junior Colleges, Part-time Courses & Teacher Training Courses.
The Podar Group was looking for a comprehensive and integrated solution that would connect their network of schools, standardize business operations and help them get a better control over their operations. After evaluating multiple players, they decided to implement Ramco 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.
Commenting on this, Gaurav Podar, Managing Director, Podar Education Network, said “What started as a modest beginning has today grown to 7 schools in Santacruz (West), and 56 Podar International Schools across the country. As we continue to grow this network, managing the SBUs centrally from our Head Office at Mumbai was becoming difficult. We needed a robust and functionally rich ERP solution that would provide a strong technology backbone to our growth plans. Ramco ERP on Cloud was a perfect fit as it blended functionality with the benefits and efficiency of Cloud. This, coupled with Ramco’s ability to offer mobility and its user-friendly interface, sealed the deal in Ramco’s favor.”
Virender Aggarwal, CEO, Ramco Systems Limited, said, “This win further reinforces the strength of the solution to cater to the Education vertical which is a flourishing sector, globally. We look forward to a successful go-live which can seamlessly integrate multiple schools across locations and provide data on a real-time basis.” Read More
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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.
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 Read More
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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
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
The Chief Invasion Officer
Cybercrime is increasing in intensity and sophistication, costing organizations time, money and potentially their reputation.
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.
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
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:
- Red Hat OpenStack Premier: Unique and enterprise-ready partner integration with Red Hat OpenStack technologies
- Red Hat OpenStack Advanced: Certified technical compatibility with Red Hat OpenStack components, including but not limited to Cinder, Nova and Quantum
- Red Hat OpenStack Ready: Base-level compatibility with Red Hat OpenStack
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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:
- Culture risk is the risk that the corporate culture is not conducive to mass collaboration.
- Adoption risk is the risk that people will not be inclined to collaborate on this subject or in this community.
- Information risk is the risk that the community's shared information will be sensitive in nature.
- 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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In an exclusive interview with Srikanth
RP and Harshal Kallyanpur, Red Hat CEO,
Jim Whitehurst details why the cloud can
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of version 2.0 of any software will be dead,
and why the new-world IT order will be led
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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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