channelworld magazine july 2013

FOCAL POINT: The consumerization of IT is about far more than just allowing staffers to use their smartphones at work. PAGE 31

CHANNELWORLD.IN

News AnalysisIntel’s processor blitzkrieg has the potential to take it to the top or crash and burn. How will this strategy pan out? PAGE 12

On Record: Subir Pal, Country Marketing Head India, ABB, explains why the company is well positioned to win in the datacenter space. PAGE 20

The Grill: Scott Robertson, VP, APAC, WatchGuard, talks about how the company has kept pace with the changing times in the security industry. PAGE 17

OpinionWhen CEOs expect cost management from their CIOs, it is often confused with cost reduction and an aversion to IT. PAGE 36

FeatureWith BYOC quickly gaining ground, organizations will soon have to define what is forbidden for employees and what isn’t. PAGE 29

InsideJULY 2013 VOL. 7, ISSUE 4

STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50ChannelWorldBHASKAR GANJIWALE of Sunfire Technologies is realigning his business to more customers using opex models.

WITH YOUR CUSTOMER

SYNC SWIM&

Five trends that are changing your customers’ business—and redefining yours. >>> Page 22

EMC2, EMC, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. © Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

Increased Market Opportunity

Integration benefits: Enhanced Margins, Faster Sales Cycle & Deployment

14 Reference Architectures to build your Co-Branded and Customizable SolutionPredictable Performance and Simplified Deployment through EMC’s testing and validation of VSPEX

EMC® VSPEX™ Proven Infrastructure is the next step in the evolution of EMC’s relationship with channel partners. In combination with EMC’s industry-leading storage and data protection technologies, this latest channel-only solution provides the flexibility to choose best-of-breed network, server and virtualization technologies that fit your customer’s environment to create a complete virtualization solution. -------

-------

----

----

n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

The Tough Time Tune

INNOVATION LIKE strategy is a much abused word. And, when the going gets tough out comes the mantra— innovate! Why is it that adversity not prosperity breeds the best forms of innovation and creativity? Most

organizations know instinctively that when dealing with tough times, one needs to change strategy and look to do different things in order to survive and prosper. I buy that that navigating the hows of innovation may still mystify companies but the whys can hardly be in question. As far as I can tell, adversity and not prosperity breeds the best form of innovation.

Take World War II, for instance. The effects of the war had far-reaching implications for most of the world. Over 60 mil-lion lives were lost, mil-lions of refugees were left homeless, the European and British economies collapsed, and most of Europe’s industrial infra-structure was destroyed. Even while the war lasted, food, fuel and all manner of resources were rationed.

Still, in a situation that can only be described as dire, the Allies and Axis powers pulled off many technological miracles. Both sides were short on everything—money for sure, but low timelines were typical (after all the option was defeat). Yet, in six years of conflict, the crucible of war spewed out radar, sonar, microwaves, antibiotics, jet engines, computers, alternative fu-els, and I’m not even bring-ing up weapons.

How was all of this ac-complished?

Let me tell you the story of synthetic rubber. By mid-1942 Japan controlled all of the Far East and Chi-na, and with them nearly all of the world’s supply of natural rubber.

The Allies were desper-ate for rubber. Without it tires, boots, planes, and well almost any thing that their armies required wasn’t possible (outside of hand to hand combat).

So, the United States launched a major effort to figure out new ways to make synthetic rubber.

A large team of chemists from many institutions worked almost non-stop till they succeeded in synthesizing a co-polymer of butadiene and styrene, that was dubbed GRS (Government Rubber Styrene). By 1944, over 50 factories in the US were churning out GRS by the ton—more than twice that of the world’s natural rub-ber production before the beginning of the war.

What I find more fas-cinating than even the specific innovations that a world at war create, are the lessons that the pro-cess holds for us.

Each breakthrough product or process re-quired a certain combina-tion of things to achieve. To begin with, an environ-ment favoring experimen-tation that not only ex-pected but also rewarded failure. Secondly, tight timelines from R&D to deployment, thus requir-

ing quick innovation, rapid prototyping and continu-ous improvement. Third, efficiently co-ordinating information, ideas and people with apt levels of security and sharing to im-prove collaboration.

So how can we apply these lessons to our busi-nesses? I believe at its essence lies an attitude and belief that all hurdles can and will be overcome. Next, setting extremely tight deadlines, since lost time cannot be replaced. Being first to market is more important than perfection— anything can always be improved. And, finally, getting cross-functional groups work-ing for a shared purpose (there’s nothing like a bit of friendly competition to push rapid innovation).

So why should these mantras not always work for organizations? Simply put, innovation within businesses is fraught with difficulty. It’s equally hard for organizations and the individuals that constitute them to think out of the cli-chéd box. And, true, game-changing innovation brings with it the risk of cata-strophic failure. How many companies are willing to take the plunge, then?

How are you fostering innovation internally. Do write in and let me know. nVijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at [email protected]

n In a situation that can only be described as dire, the Allies and Axis powers pulled off many technological miracles during World War II.

2 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD JULY 2013

For more informationCall : 1800 425 8970email : [email protected]

Delhi : 91-11-42699000Mumbai : 91-22-28395776Bangalore : 91-80-40965068www.trendmicro.co.inhttp://affinitypartner.trendmicro.com

© 2012 Trend Micro, Inc. All rights reserved. Trend Micro and the t-ball logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Trend Micro, Inc

■ NEWS DIGEST7 Cisco Beats IBM; Rules Cloud Infra | Cisco has overtaken IBM as

the leading provider of infrastructure for cloud computing, analysts at Synergy Research reported. 10 BI Software Growth Rate Slowed in 2012 | The BI software market cooled off a bit in 2012 due to difficult economic conditions and even confusion over industry buzzwords such as “big data,” ac-cording to Gartner. 11 VMware’s Plunging Headlong into SDN | VMware plans to build one of the largest SDN deployments in the industry. ■ NEWS ANALYSIS12 Is Intel on a Collision Course? | Intel’s processor blitzkrieg

is expected to strengthen its business. But this move also has

InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ JULY 2013

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

the potential to crash and burn. How will this strategy pan out?

15 Salesforce Aims Big with ExactTarget Buy | ExactTarget’s capabilities are expected to give Salesforce.com more weapons to battle against competitors such as Oracle and IBM, both of which have made major investments in marketing software.

■ OPINION02 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran points out the importance of innovation during hard times, and how, companies can learn lessons from World War II. 19 Paul Glen: As a leader it’s important to create processes that achieve a vision, not ones that just solve a problem—because the joys of achieving a vision are more long lasting.

36 Thornton A. May: When CEOs expect cost management from their CIOs, the motive is often misunder-tood. CEOs just want their CIOs to spend smarter and innovate better. ■ THE GRILL 17 Scott Robertson, VP, APAC, WatchGuard, talks about how the company has kept pace with the changing times in the security industry.

22

Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

■ COVER STORY

22 Sync & Swim With Your CustomerLet’s admit it: In a down economy, your customers are dearer and they have the last word. And if you aren’t listening to your customers’ needs, your competition is definitely lending its ears. To help you stay ahead of competition and align your business with the needs of your customer, we look at five trends that are changing your customers’ business —and redefining yours. Read on to find out what these trends are.

■ ON RECORD20 Subir PalCountry Marketing Head India, ABB, explains why the company is well positioned to win in the datacenter space —despite being a late entrant.

CHANNELWORLDGeetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, IndiaCHANNELWORLD.INPublisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello ■ EDITORIALEditor-in-Chief Vijay RamachandranManaging Editor T.M. Arun Kumar Executive Editor Gunjan TrivediAssociate Editors Sunil Shah,Yogesh GuptaFeatures Editor Shardha SubramanianSpecial Correspondents Gopal Kishore, Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya Principal Correspondents Anup Varier, Debarati Roy, Sneha Jha, Varsha ChidambaramSenior Correspondents Aritra Sarkhel, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao Senior Copy Editors Shreehari Paliath, Vinay Kumaar Lead Designers Jinan K.V., Pradeep Gulur, Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor Senior Designers Sabrina Naresh, Unnikrishnan A.V.

■ SALES & MARKETINGPresident Sales & Marketing Sudhir KamathVice President Sales Sudhir ArgulaVice President Special Projects Parul SinghGeneral Manager Marketing Siddharth SinghGeneral Manager Sales Jaideep M. Manager-KeyAccounts Runjhun Kulshrestha, Sakshee Bagri Manager Marketing Ajay ChakravarthyManager-Sales Support Nadira HyderSenior Marketing Associates Anuradha H. Iyer, Archana Ganapathy, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Dilip Menon, Rima Biswas, Saurabh Patil, Marketing Associate Arjun Punchappady, Cleanne Serrao, Lavneetha Kunjappa, Margarate D’costa, Nikita Oliver, Shwetha M. Lead Designer Jithesh C.C. Senior Designer Laaljith C.K.

■ OPERATIONSVice President HR & Operations Rupesh SreedharanFinancial Controller Sivaramakrishnan T.P.CIO Pavan MehraSenior Manager Operations: Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Senior Manager Accounts Sasi Kumar V.Senior Manager Production T.K. KarunakaranSenior Manager IT Satish Apagundi Manager Operations Dinesh P., Tharuna PaulManager Credit Control Prachi GuptaSr. Accounts Executive Poornima

■ OFFICES Bangalore IDG Media Pvt. Ltd. Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, Karnataka Tel: 080-30530300. Fax: 080-30586065Delhi IDG Media Pvt. Ltd.DLF Corporate Park, Tower 4 B,3rd Floor, Room 301, MG Road, DLF Phase 3, Gurgaon- 122001, Haryana Tel: 0124- 3881015Mumbai IDG Media Pvt. Ltd.201, Madhava, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra East, Mumbai 400051, Maharashtra Tel: 022-30685000. Fax: 022-30685023All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from

the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. Editor: Louis D’Mello, Printed At Manipal Press Ltd, Press Corner, Manipal-576104, Karnataka, India.

This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liability for errors or omissions.

Cisco Systems(India) Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IBC

D-Link India Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

EMC IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Emerson Network Power India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . BC

HP IPG. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IFC

NetAppp India Marketing & Services Pvt. Ltd . . 8 & 9

Ricoh India Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5+ flap on cover

Trend Micro India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ JULY 2013

■ FAST TRACK 16 H. Srinivasan, Founder and Director-Sales, Athena, says that the company doesn’t believe in tying

up with too many principals.

28 Sandeep Goel, Chief Executive Officer, Acu-vate, says that his company’s multi-vertical approach

has helped ward off financial risks. This has been the secret to their consistent growth over the years.

■ FEATURE29 What’s Your Cloud LOC? BYOD is so 2012. The next big push in the consumerization of IT is bring- your-own-cloud. And just as when consumer devices

poured into the enterprise, many IT organizations have already responded with a list of do’s and don’ts.

■ FOCAL POINT

31 The New Face of Old ITCOIT: Consumerization of IT includes consumer data services and cloud storage; publicly available repositories of big data, which anyone can use; open source and commercial software for every conceivable application; and publicly used identity management systems such as using

Facebook or other social networks as a single sign-on provider. Take a look at the various ways CoIT exists beyond BYOD policies, and how IT managers can get the most out of these groundswells of change in consumer technology.

BI Software Growth Rate Slowed in 2012

PAGE 10: Internet Explorer Consumes Less Power than Others

PAGE 11: VMware’s Plunging Headlong into SDN

PAGE 12: Is Intel on a Collision Course?

WHAT’S WITHIN

F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT C H A N N E L W O R L D . I N

News

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cisco Beats IBM; Rules Cloud Infra

Dell and Oracle will integrate hardware and software for customers through a strategic partnership, the companies announced. The deal expands the existing partnership between the two companies and will in part be exclusive, said Marius Haas, president of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions business. The companies will work together to deliver Oracle software on Dell x86 server platforms, optimized

for those systems, and jointly provide support. The joint offerings will include Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, as well as Oracle’s database, middle-ware and applications, Oracle Co-President Mark Hurd said.

The goal is to free enter-prises from integration and maintenance tasks and let IT departments spend more time on internal innovation, Hurd said. Dell will be a pre-ferred x86 partner for Oracle, Hurd said.

—Stephen Lawson

Dell, Oracle Join Hands

PARTNERSHIP

need for hardware from tra-ditional vendors.

There’s also been a shift in spending habits to focus on the networking func-tions in the cloud, which propelled Cisco to overtake IBM as the top supplier in this market, despite Big Blue hitting a two-year high for supplying cloud equipment in the fourth quarter of last year. Compute server sales dropped somewhat on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter to represent 46 percent of cloud equipment sales, while networking and storage equipment each made up about a quarter of the market. The slip in

compute servers being sold negatively impacted IBM and HP’s standing as the top pro-viders for cloud equipment. “Cisco has been steadily and consistently building its share in this market and now finds itself in the leadership position,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst in a press release announcing the results of the organization’s quarterly review of cloud infrastructure marketing sell-ing. Overall, the market for cloud computing equipment was off by about 12 percent compared to the previous quarter, but it was up slight-ly compared to the same quarter last year. Synergy says the broader market for cloud equipment is growing at a 3 percent annual rate.

Legacy equipment ven-dors face challenges ahead though. The onset of the Open Compute Project, led by Facebook and supported by other hyper-scale data-center users like Rackspace, are increasingly buying and assembling hardware themselves from original design manufacturers, and not from proprietary vendors like Cisco, IBM and Dell. Additionally, enterprises are outsourcing more of their compute workloads to cloud providers, slowing the need for them to buy hardware equipment themselves.

—Brandon Butler

CISCO HAS overtaken IBM as the leading provider of infra-structure for cloud

computing, analysts at Syn-ergy Research reported.

Synergy says there was a $9.7 billion (about Rs 56,400) market in the first quarter of 2013 for hardware to sup-port either service providers building public clouds, or businesses building private clouds. But, the market faces headwinds as providers are increasingly looking to buy cheap, commodity hardware and enterprises are opening up to the idea of outsourcing their operations to vendors, which combined reduce the

JULY 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 7

The Storage StarYou are a Gold Level NetApp partner. How has this partnership helped you

grow in different markets? We have been a partner of NetApp’s for six years now. Over the years, we have built a successful business model with NetApp. We have seen significant market traction through our cluster mode solutions, VDI, private cloud, and backup and business recovery solutions. We also continue to offer solutions for virtualization, Micro-

soft technologies, and file serving with NetApp storage.

The NetApp partnership has helped us win many important deals in virtualization, which is a key focus market for Veeras. We have a strong story in the enterprise segment, especially in IT/ITES and manu-facturing sectors. In terms of customer segments, we were able to get lot of enter-prise and mid-market customers as well. In terms of geography, we were also able

Insight

SUDARSAN RANGANATHAN, CEO and MD, Veeras Infotek, talks about why his company’s long association with NetApp has been the most profitable for the SI.

able vendor we work with. In fact, its strategy is not based on pricing and it is not desperate to win deals by hook or crook. We do look at pricing flexibility to accommodate customer budgets, but the focus is always on commu-nicating the right value to the customer. So it works with us very closely on each transac-tion. NetApp’s partner engagement model protects the interest and effort of a partner.

NetApp is a pure play storage ven-dor vis-à-vis many of its competitors.

Does this pose any challenge for you while pitching NetApp to your customers? It has never been a challenge. In fact, it gives us a huge competitive advantage since al-most all the vendors in server, virtualization, and security see NetApp as their preferred technology partner. For a partner like us, it gives the flexibility and comfort of propos-ing NetApp solutions with different combi-nations, based on customer requirements.

NetApp has a deep level of engagement with the best-of-breed technology com-panies in the industry, be it Cisco, Citrix, VMware, or Microsoft. These partnerships are not mere marketing alliances. They have a focus on making product enhance-ments, API, and even customer support. This indeed is a compelling value propo-sition for our customers. They are able to innovatively use their alliances to bring out best-of-breed joint solutions like FlexPod and ExpressPod.

Is it not challenging for you to work with multiple vendors for a

single solution? Since we have a tight business partnership with all the technology partners of NetApp, it has never been an issue. Besides, we un-derstand their collaborative GTM messaging better than any other partner or competitive vendor. Our expertise in virtualization and Microsoft technologies, for which the basic building block is storage, gives us a com-petitive advantage in the market.

What, according to you, is the biggest value proposition that NetApp offers

to your customers? Customer who sees value in software de-fined storage solutions will surely prefer NetApp over other vendors. No one can deliver better storage efficiency than NetApp. They offer perfect solutions for ev-ery business need, be it virtualization, file server consolidation, backup recovery, or SAP migration. The concept of unified stor-age was introduced by NetApp and later followed by other storage vendors. So it is a trendsetter and it understands where the market is headed.

NetApp has storage footprint reduction technologies like block level deduplication and compression, along with virtual stor-age- tiering. The biggest differentiator here is the use of Flash technologies along with SATA drives to improve performance with large capacity. Comparatively, other vendors do not have such “do more with less” offerings.

to make inroads in Bangalore and Hyder-abad, apart from Chennai.

It’s interesting to know that you have had key wins in the enterprise sector for

NetApp, especially when NetApp is per-ceived to be more mid-market focused. That may be the perception, but our expe-rience is different. We have seen enterprise customers migrate to NetApp from com-peting vendors. One of our recent wins is a case-in-point. The customer had its en-tire storage infrastructure running on EMC which made it very tricky. Moreover, it was a server virtualization implementation on VMware, which means EMC stood a strong chance to win. But the customer went with NetApp storage and was willing to pay a premium for the solution we proposed, ow-ing to the unprecedented benefits provided by ONTAP. The improved utilization and tight integration features offered by NetApp with VMware was a big plus.

Have you repeated this success with other customers?

We have about 85 installations of NetApp storage of which atleast 40 are large enter-prise accounts. Another case is our recent implementation at an ITES firm. The cus-tomer wanted to implement server virtu-alization and invited proposals from all the leading players including NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM. The deal eventually came to us and NetApp with close to 15 percent premi-um, purely because no one else could offer the kind of value and ROI that we offered.

Almost every large corporate has atleast one NetApp storage box or is planning to implement one. Enterprises are migrat-ing from non-Intel to Intel platforms, and NetApp is a perfect fit to handle such mi-gration projects. We are working with NetApp in a number of projects which is helping customers achieve better efficiency and returns.

So both of you seem to have an un-compromising focus on profitability.

Absolutely. NetApp is easily the most profit-

I D G C U S T O M S O L U T I O N S G R O U P

Authorized Distributor

“ We are a 100 percent channel-partner led organization. We have strategic partner relationships in computing, networking, and storage. We believe in strong integration with our partners and are constantly making considerable efforts in solution development. NetApp is committed to building innovative storage solutions that aim at offering high ROI.”

— Krithiwas Neelakantan, Director Channel & Alliances, India & SAARC,

NetApp India

-

With summer peaking in the US, the energy bills have shot through the roof. And if people want to cut their PC’s power bill, they should use—Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. That’s the result of a Microsoft-sponsored study by Fraunhofer, which found that Internet Explorer consumed less power than both Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox when accessing

CtrlS has announced a strategic partnership with Redington India. With this partnership, CtrlS aims to increase its reach and also address challenges faced by companies.

Citrix announced the appointment of Yatin Kavishwar as the head of government and defence business for India region. Under his leadership, Citrix will work towards collaborating closely with government agencies and help them success-fully implement the vari-ous e-Governance initia-tives including the State, Central, and integrated mission mode projects.

Microsoft India has announced the appoint-ment of Karan Bajwa as its Managing Director of sales and marketing group (SMSG) in the country. Bajwa, who is currently the head of the enterprise business in India, will continue to be based out of Gurgaon, and will report to Bhas-kar Pramanik, Chairman-Microsoft India.

report. However, “global macroeconomic condi-tions cannot be ignored,” the report adds. “They led to increased budget scruti-ny of both net-new as well as maintenance spending across the entire IT space, and BI was no exception.”

Business for BI was especially more difficult in Eu-rope and Latin America last year, but not in the Middle East, Africa and emerging markets in Asia-

Pacific, “which are still in ramp-up mode,” the report states.

Meanwhile, “increased confusion around new hype terms and where the tangible benefits lie most likely contributed to a slowing of sales cycles in the BI space while budget holders are trying to iden-tify the tooling and busi-ness value,” according to Gartner.

Moreover, spending on core BI infrastructure platforms “showed flat to single-digit growth” last year, with more spending happening outside of IT at the departmental level as business units seek ana-lytic applications and data-discovery tools geared to their particular needs, ac-cording to the report.

In terms of market share, SAP held onto the top spot in Gartner’s survey with about $2.9 billion (about Rs 16,900 crore) in BI revenue, although growth year-over-year was only 0.6 percent.

This is partly because its BusinessObjects software is “losing momentum” but also due to the fact that SAP’s portfolio is very broad and “falls outside of the remit of what is tracked here,” Gartner’s report states. Still, SAP has a “trump card” for BI in the form of a highly loyal user base and a strong sales organization and partner ecosystem, Gartner said. Oracle came in second with $1.95 billion (about Rs 11,100 crore), followed by IBM with $1.62 billion, SAS Institute at $1.6 billion and Microsoft with about $1.19 billion. —Chris Kanaracus

the Web’s top ten sites. Watt’s the difference?

Unfortunately for Microsoft’s case, the differences are minus-cule—on the order of about a watt when laptops were measured surfing web-sites, or just 2 per-cent or so between the other two. When using Flash, however, the differences are more pronounced: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer

uses 19 percent less power than Chrome, Microsoft said. That’s not to say that Microsoft let that small fact stop it from extrapolat-ing the massive energy savings if

only the nation’s computing pop-ulation could be converted over to its browser. Redmond said the energy saved could power 10,000 households in the United States for a year, Microsoft said, or provide the carbon reduction equivalent of growing 2.2 million trees for 10 years.

Fraunhofer didn’t explain exactly why the browsers con-sume more power, although it’s presumably tied to the number of processor CPU cycles consumed over time.

—Mark Hachman

BROWSERS

Short TakesBUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

BI Software Growth Rate Slowed in 2012

THE BUSINESS intel-ligence software market cooled off a bit in 2012 after “a

few historic banner years” of spending growth, due to difficult economic condi-tions and even confusion over industry buzzwords such as “big data,” accord-ing to a report from analyst firm Gartner.

Global spend-ing on BI soft-ware was $13.1 billion (about Rs 76,100 crore) last year, a 7 per-cent rise over 2011’s $12.3 billion (about Rs 71,500 crore) total, but the pace of growth slowed consid-erably from the approxi-mately 17 percent rate ex-perienced in 2011, Gartner said in a report.

“While this seems like a dramatic drop, it was in line with our forecasts published during 2012,” analysts Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood wrote in the

ENERGY SAVER: IE utilizes 19 percent less power than Chrome.

IE Consumes Less Power than Others

7%is the reduced growth rate experienced in the BI software market in 2012 compared to the

17 percent growth in 2011

Source: Gartner


SDN

VMware’s Plunging Headlong into SDN

IBM and the Java Virtual Machine IBM is conducting research that involves making use of the open Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in a cloud-based setting as a way to provide dynamic services, especially to mobile devices. If the research project works out, it might be consid-ered “the operating system of the future for both embedded systems and the cloud,” said Jan Rellermeyer, IBM research staff member at IBM Re-search. JVM is the well-known open software created at Sun that facilitates write-once, run-anywhere applications. The idea behind trying to establish

Around

The World

JVM as a software stack in the cloud is to facilitate a “continu-ous platform experience” be-tween JVM-based applications running in the cloud and mobile devices, Rellermeyer noted.

—Ellen Messmer

Cisco to Focus More on Mid-MarketCisco laid out its strategy and vision to strengthen its position in the mid-market segment, which the com-pany defines as entities with 100-1000 employees. Cisco’s approach to mid-market will start with a deep understanding of midsize customers—what keeps them up at night and what drives their purchasing decisions. Cisco has set forth a strat-egy built on the strong three pillar foundation of partners, product portfolio, and de-

mand generation.—Channelworld Bureau

Lenovo’s New Cloud Storage Service Lenovo offered a peek under the covers on a new con-sumer cloud storage service called Lenovo Reach, which it said will allow users to securely access their cloud-based files and applications from any device via a single login ID. The new service can encrypt and remember all user IDs and passwords, offering users a method of accessing favorite websites with a single click.

—Lucas Mearian

VMWARE HOPES to make the network-ing components of its soon-to-be-

released vCloud Hybrid Ser-vice one of its biggest selling points. In doing so the com-pany plans to build one of the largest software-defined networking (SDN) deploy-ments in the industry.

It should come as no surprise that VMware is hoping to focus the conver-sation on networking; after all, the company dropped $1.2 billion (about Rs 7,000 crore) last year to buy Nici-ra, a darling of the budding software-defined network-ing movement.

“We’re an aggressive user of SDN technology,” says Mathew Lodge, VM-ware’s VP of cloud services. VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service will include a high-volume, low-latency net-working architecture, and pretty much everything other than x86-based net-working switches will be managed by software, he says. VMware’s networking capabilities will be based on the technology it bought from Nicira, combined with elements of its security and networking features from before the acquisition. Cus-tomers will be able to create their own virtual networks and configure them as they choose, install firewalls, and set access policies within the network, and replicate and delete networks within the system. Pretty much any-thing that could have been done in a physical network with boxes and hardware, VMware can do using soft-

ware controlled through application programming in-terfaces (APIs), Lodge adds.

Rolling out virtual net-working features is central to the entire premise of the vCloud Hybrid Service, he says. One of the biggest draws for VMware’s public cloud, he says, is that it’s the easiest way to migrate legacy applications that run in on-premises environments managed by VMware onto the public cloud. Customers can use the same VMware management platform running in their own data-centers as in VMware’s public cloud, creating this hybrid cloud service. To enable that connection between the public cloud

and on-premises resources, VMware had to not only provide a network topol-ogy to allow this hybrid connectivity, but provide security and networking features, such as load bal-ancing, firewalling and seg-mentation. It isn’t the only one to provide this type of capability. But Paul Burns,

an analyst at Neovise, is happy to see this function-ality come to the cloud. “It’s one of the things that have kept traditional enterprise apps out of the cloud. Even if customers felt the cloud was reliable, they didn’t feel like they could configure the network appropriately.”

—Brandon Butler


will drag down profit mar-gins at a company used to selling Core chips for hun-dreds of dollars.

While the first-gener-ation of “Clover Trail” chips powering Windows 8 convertible tablets were underwhelming, the “Bay Trail” generation, featur-ing quad-core processors, will power touch-enabled thin notebooks with “re-ally good performance” that will hit $300 (about Rs 17,400) price points, former Chief Executive Paul Otel-lini said in April. So who’s going to buy a $600 (about Rs 34,800) Core notebook if a machine half the price will do the job?

“Basically, in Atom, they have a part that’s going to be a problem,” summed up Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research.

BRANDING WORSENS ITIntel tried to solve the prob-lem by bringing the Bay Trail chip under the Pentium and Celeron brands. Techni-cally, this makes sense, be-cause Bay Trail is PC-ready, with support for PC compo-nents like PCI Express.

Intel sources also said that it has begun phas-ing out the Atom brand in discussions with OEMs, replacing it with the “Sil-vermont” name. That’s the name of the architectural refresh for the upcoming Bay Trail chip. Whether “Silvermont” appears on the outside of a box is un-clear, but for clarity’s sake, let’s hope not.

But in trying to associ-ate the Bay Trail chips with Intel’s PC brands, Intel’s marketing gurus have created a hot mess. On one hand, we have the Pentium, the name for Intel’s flagship part—it

INTEL HAS made it clear that its fourth-generation Core or “Haswell” processors

will power future PCs. But at the low end of the note-book market, the compa-ny’s branding strategy will be far muddier—and that’s bad for Intel, considering it needs to tell consumers exactly what to buy.

On one hand, Intel needs to present a clear alterna-tive to ARM, whose tablet partners dominate the mobile space and threaten traditional PCs. From a technical standpoint, Intel seems well on its way to solving that problem. Intel’s Haswell chip will eventu-ally migrate to as little as 6 watts, Intel said, meaning that its Core chips could eventually power tablets too. But in the meantime, Intel’s upcoming “Bay

Trail” Atom chips are waiting in the wings—and could offer the perfor-mance that buyers want, at a fraction of the price.

Buyers looking to pick up an inexpensive Windows convertible or notebook may have to sort through several processor brands, including Atom, Core, Pentium, and Celeron. And that’s without even factoring in the code names: Bay Trail, Silver-mont, and Haswell, among others. Intel may have the right chip at the right price, but because its processor line-up is so crowded, it’s in real danger of screwing the whole thing up.

If there’s one thing Intel did “wrong,” it’s that it made the Bay Trail Atom chip so good—too good for some Wall Street ana-lysts, who worry that a $60 (about Rs 3,480) Atom chip

Collision Course?

Intel’s processor blitzkrieg is expected to strengthen its business. But this move also has the potential to crash and burn. How will this strategy pan out? By Mark Hachman

n NEWS ANALYSIS

Is Intel on a


was launched 20 years ago, in 1993. The Celeron isn’t much better. That’s the name Intel gave to its cut-rate, low-performance parts. If you wanted a cheap PC that could barely get the job done, you bought a Celeron. Granted, Intel’s Atom doesn’t have that much brand equity, either—it powered the first generation of Google TVs, for example, and the “Clo-ver Trail” version of the chip produced middle-of-the-range performance in convertibles like the Sam-sung ATIV Smart PC.

But what consumers will be asking is a simple ques-tion: OK, so if I buy an ARM tablet, I get this: Whatever Qualcomm or Nvidia or Samsung offer. So what can you do for me, Intel? Instead of offering a simple answer—“This is our ARM killer, Atom”—it appears that Intel’s response will be something like, “Oh, you’ll want a Pentium then. No, not the old one. The new one. See, there’s the model number right there. Oh, and

you can go with a Celeron too. No, they’re better. See, they’re part of the Silver-mont family. What’s a Sil-vermont? Here, take some brochures...”

Put another way: Intel lists 58 different Pentium models—alone. How is a consumer going to know if he or she is buying the good “Bay Trail” Pentium, or one of the older, crappier ones?

WHO WILL USE WHAT?Sources within Intel say that Intel also plans to provide a “Bay Trail” derivative for tablets, dubbed “Bay Trail-T,” that will be out by the holidays. The good news for Intel? It delivers “kick-ass quad-core performance,” the source said. The bad news? It delivers “kick-ass quad-core performance”. The leader in the tablet mar-ket is ARM, which powers, well, almost everything in the tablet and mobile space. Intel has tried to make in-roads via a partnership with Lenovo, and its Atom-pow-ered K800 phone that’s so far been sold exclusively in

Asia. But that’s a drop in the ocean compared to ARM.

ARM has already claimed that it will offer better performance per watt than the the Silver-mont architecture driving Bay Trail, and Microsoft said last year that it will work with ARM to port its Windows 8 OS over to the first generation of ARM’s 64-bit chips, due for sam-pling later this year. But Windows RT on ARM has largely failed, and Sam-sung has chosen an Atom chip to power its Galaxy Tab 3 tablet (albeit the older Clover Trail+ vari-ant). Intel appears to have a window of opportunity to exploit, if it can.

Pessimists would say that any success in tab-lets means that Intel will sell fewer, higher-margin Core chips. Optimists will respond by noting that there’s no real proof that buyers favor tablets over notebooks, and that some consumers will buy both—or even favor an In-tel-powered Windows tab-

let if the performance is high enough. And analysts like Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 note that the “Haswell” Core parts should eventually be of-fered in power envelopes as low as 6 watts, muddy-ing the water further.

And there’s one more possibility too: If Windows RT has failed and Microsoft tosses in the towel, it will still want a low-power chip to power the cheaper version of the Surface. And what could be a better option than Bay Trail? (While sources close to Intel say that’s a likely possibility, this writer’s source has remained mum on the matter.)

A CRIPPLED ATOM?The real question on the lips of Intel watchers was simple: Would Intel “cripple” the Bay Trail chip? Doing so would be relatively easy. Intel could artificially limit the clock speed or graph-ics performance of the chip, creating an artificial separation between the Core and Atom families. It’s not clear if Intel plans to go this route, although it appears that it might be leaning that way. Company executives seem to be hop-ing that rebranding Bay Trail solves the problem.

A new family of cheap, low-power, high-performance convertible tablets could be just the thing the “Wintel” partnership of Intel and Microsoft needs for the holidays. Let’s just hope that Intel cares more about giving customers the shiny new toys we’ve been asking for, even if it might mean coal in the stockings of its investors.

INTEL’S Atom tablet chip code-named Bay Trail will be repurposed for use in the

company’s Celeron and Pen-tium chips for entry-level lap-tops, desktops and all-in-ones, announced Intel.

Intel’s Bay Trail chip is based on the Atom architecture, which is in low-power smart-phones, tablets, and netbooks. Beyond the tablet chip, Intel will release Bay Trail-M (mobile) and Bay Trail-D (desktop) parts, which will be available under the Celeron and Pentium brands, Intel spokeswoman Kathy Gill said. Pentium and Celeron chips are used in low-

cost PCs, and the move repre-sents an architectural shift for those brands. It also represents Intel’s wider reliance on Atom architecture for entry-level computing. Bay Trail is based on the Silvermont architecture, which Intel claims will be up to three times faster and five times more power-efficient than older Atom cores.

Silvermont will now power Intel Inside devices including entry-level PCs, tablets, smart-phones, and low-power servers. Intel is using Silvermont in its upcoming smartphone chips code-named Merrifield, which are due to ship early next year.

Intel previously announced it would use Bay Trail in PCs, but did not announce branding for the new chips.

“Because of the advance-ments and flexibility of the ... Silvermont microarchitecture, we can customize the Bay Trail feature sets and develop variants of Bay Trail that will power a new crop of computing products at a variety of price points,” Gill said.

“The goal is to offer our customers the broadest selec-tion of form factors, features, and experiences at a range of price points,” he added.

—Agam Shah

Intel Shifting Celeron, Pentium Chips to Atom Architecture

n NEWS ANALYSIS


now.” While it may be sur-prising that Salesforce.com waited until now to buy a company like ExactTarget, it had its reasons, according to Hu. “We have been learning a lot about CMOs in the last few years,” he said.

Salesforce.com’s previ-ous acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6 pro-vided “a huge catalyst” for the ExactTarget deal, he added. “We had many deeper conversations with the CMO that gave us the education and understand-ing of the market that al-lowed us to move forward with such confidence.”

As a whole, Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud product family “plays a central role as an aggre-gator for the CMO,” he added. “So if you are very specialized in marketing analytics, it’s not an is-sue. If you are doing core marketing automation and campaign manage-

ment, you are in direct competition.” There’s a bit of product overlap be-tween ExactTarget’s and Salesforce.com’s product line, but one observer questioned whether Salesforce.com is over-paying for ExactTarget. “The question that keeps popping into my mind is why they didn’t finish building out the suite themselves,” said analyst Denis Pombriant, manag-ing principal of Beagle Research. “For $2.5 bil-lion you can hire a lot of people. Obviously they thought this was the best approach for them.”

SALESFORCE.COM’S PENDING $2.5 billion (about Rs 15,000 crore) purchase of

marketing software vendor ExactTarget will help it de-velop a new $1 billion (about Rs 6,000 crore) annual revenue stream and set the company on a clear strategic course for the foreseeable future, according to its CEO Marc Benioff.

The ExactTarget deal, the largest in Salesforce.com’s history, is scheduled to close by the end of July.

Salesforce.com already had some marketing capa-bilities, especially for social media ad campaigns and associated analytics, gained through its acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6. But it wasn’t enough to play in today’s market, Benioff said. “We recognized we have to get stronger in criti-cal areas like e-mail as well as marketing automation and lead nurturing,” he said. “We wanted to make one large purchase that brought all of these things together. We can’t keep making these small acquisitions. We needed to do something of consequence. We needed to do something now.”

Benioff also suggested that Salesforce.com was involved in a bidding war with other, unnamed parties for Exact-Target. “This was a very competitive process and we’re thrilled to be the victors here,” he said.

also partnered. Marketo recently launched a suc-cessful IPO. Marketo could have been too expensive for Salesforce.com to buy, said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear how Salesforce.com’s ex-isting relationships with Marketo and other market-ing software partners will change moving forward.

Salesforce.com’s AppEx-change, where partners can showcase their products, is “a dynamic marketplace,” Benioff said.

“We certainly plan to

continue to support all of our partners in the Ap-pExchange,” Salesforce.com chief operating officer George Hu said in an inter-view. “We’ve always had an open philosophy.”

However, Salesforce.com’s ability to offer a unified mar-keting platform will result in many customers making the switch from other marketing products, Hu added. “We think customers are going to be very excited about it.”

Hu declined to say wheth-er Salesforce.com had con-sidered buying other com-panies besides ExactTarget. “This is the company we’ve been focusing on for a while

Salesforce Aims Bigwith ExactTarget BuyIt will “double down and focus” on building out its marketing software arm. By Chris Kanaracus

But now Salesforce.com is going to close its wallet for a while. “I think what you’re going to see is us taking a vacation from [mergers and acquisitions] for anywhere between 12 and 18 months,” Benioff said. “We are going to really double down and focus on the success of Ex-actTarget. ”

In buying ExactTarget, Salesforce.com is simply fol-lowing the money. Gartner has predicted that chief mar-keting officers will spend more money on IT than CIOs by 2017. ExactTar-

get’s capabilities will also give Salesforce.com more weapons to battle against competitors such as Oracle and IBM, both of which have made major investments in marketing software.

It shares many of Exact-Target’s more than 6,000 customers, and expects to have plenty of cross-selling opportunities, said some executives. ExactTarget has also been a partner, and there’s already a degree of integration between their products. Still, some market observers had expected Salesforce.com to purchase an ExactTarget competitor, Marketo, with which it has

ExactTarget’s capabilities will also give Salesforce.com more weapons to battle against competitors such as Oracle and IBM, both of which have made major investments in marketing software.


IN A world that believes in the more the merrier, Athena IT & Telecom Solutions, a Bangalore-based IT and telecom services provider is an aberration. For

one, the company’s Founder and Director-Sales, Harikrishnan Sriniva-san, doesn’t believe in scooping out an endless list of principals to show off his product mix.

In fact, for any new account, the entry strategy for the company is through one of its six principals: Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, Riverbed, Juni-per, and Fortinet. That’s a bold stand to take for a company that’s barely three years old.

Piggybacking on this strategy, the company today has chosen the road less traveled and has recorded a whopping 100 percent revenue growth. “Every year, we select one

n FAST TRACK

Athena IT & Telecom Solutions

product which the team focuses on, gets acquainted with, and then sets out to reach targeted sales num-bers. This requires considerable bandwidth and mindshare from the Athena team and that’s only pos-

sible if we work with fewer princi-pals,” says Harikrishnan.

But getting there wasn’t easy. When the company started its operations in 2009, the market was on a down-ward spiral. But luckily for Athena, the same year, Dell was trying to rebuild its channel model in India and was aggressively looking for partners. “We aligned ourselves with Dell and within six months, we could close considerable deals. Our Dell business increased to Rs 4-5 crore in the subsequent years,” says Harikrishnan.

Another reason for its impressive growth is the company’s domain expertise in telecom. This prompt-ed Athena to get into networking and it signed up with Cisco and Juniper. Recently, Athena joined hands with Fortinet for security solutions and Riverbed for WAN acceleration and optimization. This broad spectrum of limited but niche technology provider mix offers the company an end-to-end portfolio of services.

Athena has also launched its ISP division in order to cater to its customers’ telecom needs. Athena, says Harikrishnan, has also invest-ed a 49 percent stake in a company which specializes in engineering software which will expand Athe-na’s customer base. n

—Shubhra Rishi

Founded: 2009

Headquarters: Bangalore

Employees: 18

Revenue 2010-11: Rs 3.5 crore

Revenue 2011-12: Rs 8 crore


Key Executives: Prithi H. Co-founder; Director–Finance and Operations

Key Principals: Dell, Lenovo, IBM, Cisco, Juniper, Riverbed, Fortinet

Key Technologies: Computing, servers, storage, virtualization, security, WAN acceleration and optimization

Website: www. athenaitsol.com

Snapshot

We don’t believe in tying up with too many principals, says Founder and Director-Sales, H. Srinivasan.

Rs 9 Cr

Rs 11 cr

REVENUE GROWTH

SOURCE: ATHENA IT & TELECOM SOLUTIONS

Rs 3.5 cr

Rs 8 cr

Rs 19 cr

2010-11 2011-12 2012-13

Ph

oto

by

SR

IVA

TS

A S

HA

ND

ILY

A


Dossier

Your company’s core focus, UTM, is a fairly commoditized technology. Considering this, how bright is WatchGuard’s future? There are couple of things that are changing at WatchGuard which are also chang-ing in the UTM market. Ever since its introduction in 2007, this market has been maturing at a rapid pace. In 2010, WatchGuard decided to re-architect solutions through next-generation network security appliances [XTM] in anticipation of its growing importance to the mid-market. The XTM with one firmware spans across all hardware platforms—from lower-end models to the top-end ones. For a firewall/UTM appliance to deliver more throughput and other capabilities, we built the Intel platform with a Linux kernel.

With Linux and UTM being modular in design, a new security service can be plugged in at anytime from best-in-class vendor technologies and they will be integrated into our UTM. This is unlike some vendors who build AV and Web-security in-house and integrate them to their appliances. This is a big differentia-tor as we are increasing our footprint in the mid-market which prefers the best security brands. The trend is shifting to-wards the mid-market and we are in talks with a few large enterprise vendors.

n THE GRILL

Vice President, APAC, WatchGuard, talks about how the company has kept pace with the changing times in the security industry.

Scott Robertson

Name: Scott Robertson

Designation: Vice President, Asia Pacific

Company: WatchGuard

Present Role: Robertson took over as WatchGuard’s vice president for sales for the Asia Pacific region in 2012 after leading the turnaround in the ANZ region, which recorded over 40 percent year-on-year growth.

Career Graph: Prior to joining WatchGuard in 2007, he was the APAC general manager for CRYPTOcard, a leader in network authentication. He has also worked at Microsoft, where he managed the enterprise sales and services business. As regional sales manager at Visio, he was responsible for direct and indirect sales.

Ph

oto

gra

ph

by

FO

TO

CO

RP


n THE GRILL | SCOTT ROBERTSON

Aren’t you worried that companies you’re seeking an alliance with could explore the UTM market independently? The industry has always been talking about the unpre-dictable nature of the security road-map. Often, we see that technologies like wireless and security are blended together. We know that we do our job very well. Similarly, other vendors we intend to collaborate with know theirs well. So, I don’t see our OEM partners jump into the firewall/UTM space and intensify competition.

WatchGuard lacks ful-blown DLP and au-thentication solutions. Why is that? Our technologies in XTM and XCS do offer content security. This, not only delivers

spam and Web security solutions, but also provides powerful DLP capabilities. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if we decide to integrate some technologies to differ-entiate ourselves more. We are not just a pure firewall/UTM vendor anymore. We are now a business security vendor with a range of technologies for organi-zations of all sizes.

Don’t the acquisitions of McAfee, Sonic-WALL, Astaro, and others by big IT compa-nies weaken your standing in the industry? Most acquisitions, particularly ones by large vendors, are difficult to integrate. The acquiring company doesn’t neces-sarily focus on the acquisition and the smaller company doesn’t have any clout in the big one. It often becomes an SKU on the pricelist. We see many vendors consolidate to become a part of a large group where the dominant products are not UTM. R&D tends to become skewed towards products that generate more revenue. These acquisitions are usually successful after three to five years. Thus, the consolidated landscape is a massive opportunity for us as we continue to be a pure security player focused on UTM/XTM solutions.

How do you think your enterprise chan-nel partners should pitch WatchGuard to execute profitable business deals? We try to address the concerns of large enter-prise system integrators by presenting two questions: What can we do for you and how can we position ourselves better to help you. We tell them clearly that XTM is not just a security solu-tion, but is a TCO story. With large integrators, security solutions are usu-ally a part of a larger project with tech-nologies like virtualization and storage which tend to get more priority. The value proposition of one platform con-sole and other features of XTM free a CIO’s budget and help them invest in other technologies. WatchGuard’s RapidDeploy is a cloud-based configu-ration utility that eliminates the need for IT professionals to pre-configure devices or travel to the project loca-tions. Customers and partners can order the appliance from a single dis-tributor and it will be shipped directly to the customer. It’s a huge benefit for partners working with organizations with distributed networks. We have

also identified a few MSS partners to explore the UTM-as-a-service model in India.

Compared to Cisco and Juniper, you seem to be less aggressive about the enterprise segment and fighting off competitors. A certain amount of business might sound attractive in the enterprise market. We have a sizeable customer base here. That space has two elements—core network and data sold. Most large enterprise ven-dors manage their network, but often WatchGuard products are bundled in it. SMBs continue to be our big strength but the next big opportunity is the mid-market and not the enterprise. Let Check Point, Cisco, Juniper, and the rest battle it out as their framework is largely geared for the enterprise space.

Considering the competition, isn’t the mid-market a tough space to do business in? Our primary distributors in India are RAH Infotech and iValue who work with their set of channel partners. We also engage with a focused set of solution providers in the tier-2 space. There has been tremendous growth in the past six to 12 months in terms of geographical reach. A substantial part of that growth has come through large, complex deals. Apart form metros, we are targeting B- and C-class cities where many mid-sized companies are located. We plan to align with more tier-1 part-ners in the latter half of this year.

According to Gartner, 20 percent of the VPN/firewalls will be deployed on a virtual switch on a hypervisor and not on a physi-cal security appliance. Are partners ready for this major shift? It’s still early days in terms of adoption. We have released products on a virtual platform like XTM for both VMware and Hyper-V. We also have the XCS product on VM-ware. Most customers will invest in the physical appliance with a virtual strategy in place in the next couple of years. Our SMB dominance will cer-tainly drive more Hyper-V for virtual UTM. Since the last year, a majority of the partners we’ve worked with are VMware partners too. This is a natu-ral fit and, therefore, our partners are being empowered according to chang-ing trends.

—Yogesh Gupta

We have changed from what we were

earlier. We are, now, a business security vendor with a wide range of technologies for organizations of all sizes.


n OPINION

Purposeful Processes

PROCESSES SEEM to come and go. Too often, though, they wither away from disuse when they still have val-ue. How can we ensure that our staffs remain engaged with worthwhile processes? Consider the life cycle of

the typical process. It usually is created as a response to some organizational trauma, like a major project failure. For a while, everyone embraces it, testing, tweaking, celebrating successes, and mitigating inconveniences. But eventually, enthusiasm wanes. Urgent needs come up, and people decide that, just this once, a shortcut is jus-tified. The decay begins. Before you know it, the process is forgotten, a new trauma occurs, and the cycle starts again. Each time it happens, we feel terrible. But when we better understand why we let this hap-pen—how much human nature has to do with it—we can interrupt the cycle.

Human motivation isn’t all that mysteri-ous. We tend to focus our attention on what feels good. And for us as geeks, solving problems feels really good. We love to roll up our sleeves and analyze problems, and we glory in the thrill of solving them. So a new process feels good because we’re solving a problem: “Why did the project fail, and what can we do about it?” As long as the problem seems present, gnarly, and intractable, we enjoy following the process. But once a problem has been solved, it’s not so interesting to us anymore.

Eventually, we follow the process because we are obliged to. We start to think of it as rules to follow rather than a solution to our problems. Our inner schoolchild starts to rebel. Some of us might start to unconsciously solve a new problem: “What is the minimum process that I can follow and still deliver an ac-ceptable outcome?” Others get caught up in the more immediate rewards of short-term problem-solving. Solving an urgent problem is more rewarding than

following a process because the joy of its solution comes immediately.

If you want to keep off the process merry-go-round, you’ll need to fundamentally change how you as a leader think and feel about the rewards of following processes. You’ve got to give the team something last-ing to care about. The key to that is at the very beginning of developing a process. In short, create processes that achieve a vision, not ones that just solve a problem. A process has to speak to something bigger than the last problem you encountered, so that ad-herence to it lasts longer than the removal of symptoms. The joys of achieving a vision are somewhat different from those of solv-ing a problem. Problems give way to forget-fulness when their noxious symptoms have been removed. A vision is more long lasting. You might liken it to marriage. Most people get married not to solve a problem but in pursuit of a vision of sharing a life together, perhaps starting a family. If you get married to solve a problem rather than to pursue a vision—because it’s the easiest way to obtain wealth, say, or because your visa is about to expire and you don’t want to leave the country—the chances are the marriage won’t last. The same is true of processes.

Whenever you talk to your group about a process, focus on the first principles of your vision. As people come to recognize the role of the process in achieving that vision, it will become self-sustaining. n

As a leader it’s important to create processes that achieve a vision, not ones that just solve a problem—because the joys of achieving a vision are more long lasting.

Paul Glen, CEO of Leading Geeks, is devoted to clarifying the murky world of human emotion for people who gravitate toward concrete thinking. His newest book is 8 Steps to Restoring Client Trust: A Professional’s Guide to Managing Client Conflict. You can contact him at [email protected].

PAUL GLEN


Country Marketing Head

India, ABB, explains why

the company is well positioned

to win in the datacenter

space—despite being a late

entrant.By Shantheri

Mallaya

Why is ABB talking about its datacenter strategy now, given that it has formidable rivals like Schneider Electric and Emerson Network Power to contend with? PAL: ABB is structured around five divisions which drive five differ-ent kinds of businesses. We have competencies in both products and sys-tems that drive various domains; the datacenter being one of them. The datacenter space is a sunrise sector in India whereas in other markets it is fairly established and mature. Till now, we saw servers leased out of hubs such as the US and Singapore, whereas now, telecom and IT players are increasingly setting up datacenters in major cities like Mumbai, Gur-gaon, Hyderabad, and Chennai.

So, the datacenter strategy is a well thought- out extension of ABB’s existing capabilities.PAL: Absolutely. Tradi-tionally, ABB has entered domains that it considers could serve as funnels for its existing and planned products. If you look at the datacenter space, we already have the entire electric chain—utility links, circuit breakers, transformers, power dis-tribution panels, UPS, and power distribution units—right up to the server. We have the entire range in our manufactur-ing portfolio.

What challenges are you facing in driving your datacenter message?PAL: The datacenter is a new area into which we are expending our efforts.Creating a responsible organization internally, for a new market of an old traditional business, is the initial challenge. But there is no reason for us not to remain active in this sector. We have a team called ‘industry initiative’ that drives the packaging of products and solutions for a partic-ular domain. That is how we have positioned our-selves internally. We are a focused company even from a global datacenter initiative point of view, given that the ABB center of excellence in Singa-pore is actively driving the APAC market.

What investments has ABB made for this initiative?PAL: In terms of resources, there are datacenter com-petencies built around this initiative. In process au-tomation, we have a data-center team built around

Subir Pal,ON RECORD n


energy management. In power systems, we have a team dedicated to datacen-ter connection equipment and packaged solutions. In power products, we have a team that is developing datacenter products.

It is not that we only want to execute turnkey projects; we want to be the preferred vendor to engineering, procure-ment, and construction contractors (EPCs) who are not manufacturers themselves. We have invested in manpower resources and positioned ourselves well.

Analysts are keenly watching the rise of the datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) software space. ABB has also plunged actively into boosting its DCIM capabilities…PAL: Yes, it is part of our ‘datacenters of the future’ drive. ABB has strategically acquired companies like Power Assure, and Newave, among others that func-tion in the advanced technologies space. ABB is investing into the future of the datacen-ter—tier-4 datacenters—where energy efficiency, reliability, and 99 per-cent uptime are the criti-cal components.

We have also taken the software opportunity in asset management, and load management systems, amongst others. These will add muscle to the drive.

ABB is a late entrant to the datacenter story. What is your mandate for the next six months?PAL: We are a strong player in the energy efficiency space, and have audits and solutions across industries across the globe. When it comes to the energy management portfolio for datacenters, our product, branded Decathlon, is a strong tool for DCM, covering all aspects of the datacenter. This is a substantial differentiator for ABB and through this we hope to raise the

bar for energy efficient datacenters.

ABB has a legacy of change. We want to be ahead of time globally as well as locally, and this covers not only tradi-tional businesses but also sustainability businesses. We will be exploring new markets and innovations constantly. Being a late entrant of sorts does not hinder us in any way in In-dia. Take a look at a space like renewable energy. We got into the solar energy market around 2010, and today, we are among the top-three players. Replicat-ing that success in other domains is not an unrealis-tic calculation.

Is localization one of your focus areas?PAL: Yes, it is one of our major initiatives across all countries. As a policy, ABB tries to optimize its resources keeping local

needs in mind. Our R&D spends go towards devel-oping and localizing our global resources for domes-tic markets in order to le-verage and optimize these resources. Fortunately, we have a strong global con-nection with 1,000-plus people (at the Global En-gineering Center in Ban-galore). Any India specific solution can be leveraged through the Global Engi-neering Center. We have the skill sets in place.

Increasingly, datacenters are seen as profit centers, and investments in datacenters

are being tied to business outcomes. This makes areas like capacity planning more important. How is this trend changing the way you talk to your customers? PAL: Datacenters are a competitive business so our products have to be competitive in quality and pricing. Yet, being cheap is not the solution. So, TCO becomes the crux.

ABB is an established player with a wide sup-port base, and service and sales offices for upgrades. We emphasize that ROI is fundamental to all invest-ments and that it is im-portant not to sideline the importance of TCO.

Will the datacenter business play out as solutions alone or have you evolved a service delivery model as well?PAL: That is a key consid-eration. In most sectors, we play across multiple

channels. Large datacen-ters are splitting datacen-ters into multiple pack-ages—civil, electrical and server, and IT. We will be a provider of products and be a part of the solu-tions market as well.

Various combos will play out and we will use all channels at our dis-posal. Channel partners will also play a role at the product level. We have a wide network of partners—between 400 and 450—all of whom are centered around the datacenter. Some are fairly active, and more

would come into the dragnet.

Your earlier roles in channel management must help you plenty with this new portfolio. PAL: I have a deep expo-sure to channels, which comes very handy for product positioning and branding. But today, it is more of a composite of product and systems. I might say, the horizons have broadened—with a mix of traditional en-gineering and the rigors of software engineering, bringing best practices of each to my current role.

As organizational equa-tions between revenue generation and revenue management streams be-come complex, it becomes critical that we under-stand how to think global and act local; sound prin-ciples will always stand in good stead. n

SUBIR PAL | ON RECORD n

Being a late entrant into the datacenter space does not hinder us. We got into the solar energy market around 2010, and today we

are among the top-3 players. Replicating that success is not unrealistic.


n COVER STORY | CUSTOMER ALIGNMENT

SWIM

BHASKAR GANJIWALEDirector-Technology Services, Sunfire Technologies

THE WRITING’S on the wall: Listen to your customers or perish. There is no dearth of options out there and it

doesn’t take much for your custom-ers to shift loyalties. Customers are now discerning. They demand that their requirements are met, and met in the manner they desire. If the findings of the CIO Mid Year Review 2013 survey are anything to go by, then the Indian CIO—your custom-er—cannot be taken for granted. He is straddling tight budgets, delayed decisions from business, and walking the tightrope between IT capabili-ties and business needs. While there are some customer trends that are fast becoming the norm, a handful of


If you aren’t listening to your customers’ needs, your competition is. Here are five trends that are changing

your customers’ business —and redefining yours. By Shantheri Mallaya

your peers have sensed the opportu-nity and have cracked the customer code in a highly competitive market. You can too. Here are five trends that are changing your customer’s busi-ness—and yours.

1The Opex Model Becomes More Popular

Organizations are moving beyond thinking about drawing out huge amounts and budgets towards set-ting up capital assets or even merely renting out a few pieces of hardware. From circumventing the heart break of obsolescence to acquiring tax benefits and improving cash flow, the

idea of moving to alternate models of utilizing infrastucture is the new mantra of buying, as the CEO of Ban-galore-based Central Data Systems, K. Subrahmanya would like to illustrate. His company has astutely replicated what it does with short-term projects on a larger scale.

The solution provider, who rents out equipment to about 5 percent of its customer base for a period of 6 months, has moved to the next level. Central Data Systems (CDS) works actively with its core vendors’ financial arms—such as Cisco’s Cisco Capital, for example. CDS approaches its IT/ITES customers with leasing options for a period of three to five years at interest rates

WITH YOUR CUSTOMER

SYNC SWIM&

between 10-12 percent which Cisco Capital doles out. Customers pay EMIs for both the product and service com-ponents for the said duration. “Most of the financial arms of vendors are cash-rich and need emerging markets such as India to promote their technologies. This is why the opex idea is really catching on.” Further, the finance companies, while insisting that there should be some percentage of their own products, are also open to the idea of the deal having non-competitive third-party products.

So, why are customers happy? The leasing story allows customers—at the end of the tenure of the agree-ment—to either refresh the assets or buy them out, as the case may be. This means no upfront investments, competitive interest rates coupled with the fact that they know that their services for the duration are covered in the agreement.

It’s a win-win situation as the solution provider also gains. About 25 percent of CDS’ long-term business is coming from leasing deals—and ensuring services—and the company envisages that this percentage is only bound to rise,

particularly in the IT/ITES sector.But is this a better option than mov-ing to the cloud? Subrahmanya thinks so. With fewer issues such as security to deal with; the divid-ing line is a bit thin. It definitely is a combination of the cloud and these models that would work in the long run, making customers look at this option more favourably, he avers.

Bhaskar Ganjiwale, director-Technology Services, Sunfire Tech-nologies, couldn’t agree more that the opex wave is catching on and custom-ers are biting the bait at an acceler-ated rate. The Pune-based solution provider goes with the opex mantra of “return on individual”, which he

says is the new ROI. He has reasons to strongly advocate this. This is based on the fact that today return on investment is passé, when customers are increasingly looking less at capital investments and more at maximizing what they realize out of quarterly or monthly pay-outs on usage.

Sunfire has now tied up with vendors such as Citrix to push VDI, which it believes is the best way to help customers get their Return on Productivity of Employee (ROPE) as well as the new ROI. And that’s be-ing justified thus: If a customer opts for VDI, he will realize his ROPE in less than a year, which the company amply demonstrated with an IT/ITES customer in Pune. The custom-er who has a 1,000 user base, opted for VDI, and Sunfire is confident that whatever their scalability patterns may be, this customer is now sold on the idea of “pay as you grow”, which is fundamentally a building block for the cloud.

A BFSI veteran-turned entre-preneur, Ganjiwale is in talks with customers in the BFSI sector too. “While the capex-opex debate con-tinues, customers are seeing the value of minimizing hardware costs, and opting for simpler expensing-off of these components through options such as thin clients. We are assisting them by providing consult-ing services, talking to our vendors, and helping them get financing op-tions through finance companies, in the event of the vendor not having financial services to offer to the cus-tomer,” he says.

2Cloud Computing Gains More Ground—Faster

If opex opens the discussion to phase out huge expenditures, the cloud is one of the routes that enterprises ultimately take. As the CIO Mid-Year Review 2013 survey indicates, about 84 percent of CIOs expect to see some sort of cloud—public, private or hybrid—implemented over the next 12 months. And as the hype cycle and curiosity even out—and demand trickles down the line—the good news is, tier-2 players are assessing


K. SUBRAHMANYACEO, Central Data Systems

2012

2013

Compared to last year, more Indian CIOs are devoting a larger chunk of their budgets to opex.

More Budgets Dedicated to Opex

54

47

4357

n Opex n Capex


and gearing up at various stages to meet growing customer demand.

Pune-based Aashna Cloudtech is clear about what the customer is ask-ing for. An early cloud entrant, this solution provider has witnessed the trend changing for the better over the last decade, with clients asking extensively about assurance of data confidentiality in a multi-tenant en-vironment, details in terms of SLAs, exit clauses from existing subscrip-tions, an integrated cloud solution to manage the business, and an ex-perienced vendor who has managed cloud application deployment.

The company also sees demand around access of data in real-time as well as on mobile devices. “We posi-tion ourselves as a cloud aggregator focused on enterprise applications and one service provider for all cloud applications. We clearly see the trend changing now, and are glad

tion provider. “CIOs of large firms or CEOs of SME clients would very soon prefer dealing with few cloud vendors and hence we are branding ourselves as the cloud aggregator partner who will be able to offer an integrated enterprise applications solution. We also have a consulting edge of having managed over 250 cloud projects over the last 10 years.”

If Aashna is about the more active, robust western India market, the east-ern part of the country isn’t too far behind. Contrary to the myth about the slow uptake of newer concepts in this market, Kolkata’s Future Ne-twings has latched on to the oppor-tunity that this trend offers and put together its business plan, with MD, Jaideep Chakrabarti quite focused about what’s going to sell. “The cloud-based opex model is definitely an area to watch out for,” says Chakrabarti. Future Netwings has built its strategy on offering infrastructure-as-a-ser-vice. The company has back-to-back strategic tie ups with cloud service providers. “We have substantially enhanced our skillsets on virtualiza-tion in order to support the cloud initiative,” he says. More recently, Future Netwings tasted success when

a large customer, after trying to de-sign its network for about six months internally, chose to give it all up and signed up for a cloud-based opex model with the help of the solution provider. This, Chakrabarti feels, is a clear indication of the pulse of the market. The coming year, Future Netwings will be targeting the SME segment and will be rolling out its own cloud-based solutions. Cur-rently, the company is in the process of finalizing the technology and soft-ware solutions that it will be offering to customers.

Customers, for some years now, have been favoring a vendor neu-tral approach, best of breed, as the term goes. Bangalore’s Yashasvi Infosolutions tailors a mix of VM-ware, Microsoft, and Oracle, and layers open source to provide a private cloud set up for IT/ITES companies. About six months ago, this solution provider worked closely with a small customer, hav-ing about 300 users to deliver a me-dium-sized private cloud—wherein the customer saved itself the trou-ble of buying multiple hardware, software was bundled into the sin-gle hardware, and the cloud solu-

the investment we made in selling and implementing cloud a decade ago is really paying off,” says Biswas Nair, MD, Aashna Cloudtech. In the position of a cloud aggregator, Aas-hna has deployed the technology for an impressive clientele which has names such as Hindustan Unilever, Novartis, Olympus, and Nimbus, among others. Besides, Aashna has fortified its vendor partnerships with NetSuite, Success Factors, Work-Force Software, and Google.

The coming year is going to be quite opportunity laden for this solu-

A majority of CIOs say they have completed or expect to complete cloud projects this year.

Cloud Projects Gather Momentum

83% 81%

Completed Expected to Complete

BISWAS NAIRMD, Aashna Cloudtech

very focused on our optimization strategy and now, we are a notch above the rest when it comes to experience in this domain,” says Gupta. Grid, which experienced long, painful sales cycles earlier, now, sees its efforts paying off as customer demand trickles in, mak-ing this a certain deal-breaker.

Ganjiwale of Sunfire is of a simi-lar opinion. He believes that IT as an enabler of operational efficiency is now a strong deal clincher, with SMEs calculating the savings on overheads such as power and electricity, transaction time, and also return on the individual in a significant manner. He believes that small pieces such as VDI-in-a-box could help companies achieve huge operational efficiencies, since projects turnaround faster, are easy to implement—as less as 30 days some for larger customers—and the benefits are quick to see. This is the next big opportunity that Sunfire has already trained its guns on, and hopes to see a lot of action.

4The Mobile Movem ent Really Comes Home

The burgeoning mobile workforce is going to raise the levels of curiosity and adoption of mobile technologies. The workplace is now a challenge of sorts and most CIOs are grap-pling with the question: At what level are we going to allow or imple-ment mobile technologies and how?

tion was ready to go live. “We were Statement-of-Work (SOW) bound and delivered the project effectively on time and the client is happy real-izing its objectives,” says Sanjeev Patil, director, Yashasvi Informa-tion Solutions. The success of such projects has given Yashasvi the confidence to venture into slightly bigger projects in order to ride the cloud wave.

3Increasing Focus on Operational Efficiency

IT should always be deployed in a manner that increases the opera-tional efficiency within an organiza-tion. More and more CIOs are of the view that IT should enable them to achieve this objective. Manoj Gupta, CEO, Grid Infocom, has seen the term coming up very often during discussions with customers. “With the sheen of labor arbitrage waning, there is also an unqualified assump-tion that Indian workers of global conglomerates are not as efficient as their global counterparts. So, organizations are keen to track the component in order to meet global mandates. If we haven’t factored operational efficiency as one of the

net outcomes of an IT implementa-tion, then it is high time to do so,” says Gupta.

Grid has tied up with a niche US-based company called Openspan, provider of user experience software solutions, catering to customers mainly in the IT/ITES, BPO space, where back-office productivity is the core concern for managements. Customers who have implemented this solution have been able to track problematic areas such as handling time and transaction processing time. The customers are also able to break down—component wise—as to how much time was actually pro-ductive. A customer has been able to leverage the Openspan solution by reducing handling time by about 15 percent. Grid had also used SAP’s User Based Communication Pro-cess to help a couple of customers in the utilities sector to streamline their complex tariff calculation mechanisms besides also helping effectively integrate their multiple communication channels.

Grid sensed these opportuni-ties about two to three years ago, and is an early bird in these areas, with about 50 percent of the focus centered on Business Communica-tion Management (BCM). “We are


Compared to last year, more CIOs say they have increased focus on operational efficiency.

58%

61%

2012 2013

JAIDEEP CHAKRABARTIMD, Future Netwings Solutions

Greater Focus on Operational

Players such as Aashna Cloudtech have already jumped onto the mo-bile bandwagon. “As more and more companies—SMEs and large enter-prises—move towards seeking more real-time data and as cloud applica-tions get available on mobile devices, this could open up a huge opportunity for us.”

Aashna has launched and offers NetSuite ERP and CRM on an An-droid platform. Going forward, the solution provider hopes to get its existing and new customers hooked onto understanding the benefits of mobile CRM. Akhil Ranjan Jha, di-rector of Kolkata’s Comprehensive Consultancy, is of the firm belief that the mobility wave is here to stay and has moved out of the hype cycle. This company, an established player in the government, education and research sector, is actively setting up labs for mobile computing and for mobile app development. These are two segments that, he says, are the bulwark of the future. “This sec-

performance computing. Awareness levels about the need to upgrade networks in order to increase band-width and also deal with the vulner-ability quotient of mobile networks are areas of interest and concern that solution providers must look at.

“This is where our long-term ener-gies ought to be channelized,” says Jha. These observations and clarity in the eastern market that account for a mere 8 percent of total IT busi-ness in the country, is commendable.

5 Adoption of BI and Analytics Touch New Heights

The SME segment, like the large enterprises segment, wants to grow and consume as much of the com-bination of analytics tools, however it can be supported either on the cloud or through mobile platforms.

Ahmedabad-based Silver Touch Technologies believes that its SME clientele—which is in the Rs 300-500 crore bracket and mainly in the markets of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Ma-harashtra and Delhi—is ripe for the use of BI solutions.

This solution provider has used SAP and Microsoft tools—which the company believes are ideal for this market—to help a couple of its man-ufacturing customers set up their supply chain management (SCM) and production management (PM) processes, thereby helping manage-ment map out its procurement and

resource costs better. The ERP/CRM players have templates that, with about 10-15 percent customization, are ready to go-live. In the four key markets that this


tor is our forte, But, we are also not averse to trying out the commercial markets as well, since the action is kicking off in a big way with organi-zations likely to opt for upgradation of networks that will support large-scale mobile computing,” he says.

Comprehensive Consultancy, which operates primarily in the east-ern and north-eastern markets, is hoping to see a growth of 16 percent in 2013-14, a significant chunk of which is likely to come from its new growth areas of mobility and high

company operates in, over the next two years, Silver Touch hopes to keep BI and analytics as its key focus areas, cloud and mobility be-ing the ‘cause and effect’ of the de-mand for the former. “Customers are asking us to break down alert systems, workflow approvals, price lists, and the state of inventory. So the trend has kicked in. We will be definitely gearing up to meet these needs,” says Vipul Thakkar, direc-tor, Silver Touch Technologies. n

24% Of Indian CIOs say

mobility will have the most profound effect on

their roles this year.

Mobility topped a list of 10 technologies that CIOs say will have a huge impact this year.

The Impact of Mobile Technologies

n Completed within the last 12 months n Expected to complete in this fiscal n Not on our roadmap

A majority of CIOs say they expect to complete BI and analytics projects this fiscal.

30%

63%

8%

BI and Analytics Gain Ground

MANOJ GUPTACEO, Grid Infocom

HYDERABAD-BASED ACUVATE has been in business since 2006. In these seven years the solution provider has

earned a reputation as a SharePoint, BI, and enterprise-based social me-dia solutions company. “A balanced approach to these solution segments has helped us make a mark in the industry,” says Sandeep Goel, CEO, Acuvate. The SI’s focus on BI, social media, and ERP integration has reaped rich dividends. It expects to clock Rs 16 crore in FY 2012-13— a 45 percent increase from its 2011-12 revenues.

But working with a multi-technol-ogy focussed strategy has not been easy. As a fledgling solution provider, the company lacked technically-skilled staff. Acuvate solved this by re-

n FAST TRACK

Acuvate

cruiting experienced people from tier-1 firms. “Now, we have a strong team that has good working knowledge of different industry verticals,” says Goel. As Acuvate marched ahead with its solutions offerings in a up-

country markets, it was constantly faced with a customer-demand for local presence. Goel knew such a demand could not be met and set-ting up offices in smaller regions would be impractical. Instead, the team at Acuvate expanded its pres-ence in bigger cities like Pune, Gur-gaon, and Bangalore. It, now, also has offices in the UK, the US, and Netherlands.

The SI has targeted verticals like manufacturing and BFSI. According to Goel, this multi-vertical approach has helped Acuvate ward off financial risks to a significant extent. “Many of our solutions have helped enterprise customers improve their ROI,” says Goel. The company has implemented industry specific solutions in collaboration with princi-pals like Microsoft, SAP, and Nintex for customers in India and overseas. Its customers include Indigo, Genpact, Ceat, and AON among others.

Goel intends to keep up Acuvate’s momentum. The company plans to launch new solutions every quar-ter. “Our incubation team is work-ing on launching an HTML 5-based mobility solution in the near fu-ture,” says Goel. n

—Aritra Sarkhel

Founded: 2006

Headquarters: Hyderabad

Employees: 200




Branches: Pune, Gurgaon, Bangalore, New York, Kansas, Slough (UK), The Hague (Netherlands)

Key Executives: Rakesh Reddy, Chairman; Shubendu Banerjee, Chief Operating Officer

Key Business Activities: Cloud, collaboration, document management, business process management, business intelligence, and mobility

Key Principals: Microsoft, SAP, Nintex

Website: www.acuvate.com

Snapshot

A multi-vertical approach has helped ward off financial risks, says Sandeep Goel, CEO, Acuvate.

Rs 9 Cr

Rs 11 cr

REVENUE GROWTH

SOURCE: ACUVATE

Rs 5 cr

Rs 11 cr

Rs 16 cr

2010-11 2011-12 2012-13


BRING-YOUR-OWN-DEVICE IS so 2012. The next big push in the consumerization of IT is bring- your-own-cloud. And just as

when consumer devices poured into the enterprise, many IT organizations have already responded with a list of do’s and don’ts.

The standard approach has been to forbid the use of personal cloud ap-plications for business use, by offering official alternatives—the “use this, not that” approach—and to carve out separate cloud storage workspaces for business documents that can be walled off, managed and audited. But personal cloud services are difficult to control, and users are adept at going around IT if the productivity tools in their person-al cloud can do the job easier, faster, and better. IT wants a bifurcated approach

to consumer and professional cloud apps and storage. But users don’t work that way anymore.

GETTING AROUND ITScott Davis, CTO of end-user comput-ing at VMware, originally began using a personal cloud app for business after the IT organization failed to offer a vi-able solution that met his needs. Davis, who has speaking engagements all over the world and needs to share large mul-timedia presentation files, asked for an exception to VMware’s e-mail attach-ment size quota. IT responded first by suggesting that he pare down the con-tent and then followed up by suggesting that he buy “a bag full of USB drives” to send presentations by mail.

“That’s when I started using Drop-box,” he says. “IT has competition.

People know what’s out there and how to get the job done if IT doesn’t help them.” Gartner analyst Michael Gar-tenberg agrees. “IT has to deal not only with bring-your-own devices but bring-your-own services,” he says. People will bypass even viable alternatives if they feel that the officially sanctioned professional cloud offering isn’t equal to the task—or if they have a personal cloud app they like better. “If it’s digital and it’s consumer, it’s going to find its way into the office. People will come up with reasons for using it,” he says.

At construction management firm Skanska USA Building, employees are mashing up business and personal work on a wide range of personal cloud ser-vices, including Dropbox and Evernote. Today, says senior enterprise engineer Jeff Roman, “We don’t control that.” But IT is actively reviewing its options. “What are we going to limit? What can they access at work and at home?” he asks. Right now that’s controlled by use policies that employees must follow as to what types of documents need to stay out of the cloud and what’s permissible. For example, financial data “should never touch a cloud service,” he says, nor should some documents relat-ing to government projects.

But Skanska is also looking for an officially sanctioned cloud storage option. It is considering Microsoft’s SkyDrive Pro, using Citrix’s ZenMobile to provide virtual access to files stored on back-end servers, or using niche ser-vices such as Autodesk Buzzsaw, which puts construction design tools and documents in the cloud. “We don’t need people using all of these different tools,” he says, but any solution must be as easy to use as the personal cloud tools employees rely on. Otherwise, users are likely to bypass the official alternative.

“It will be tough to find a one-size-fits-all solution,” he says, “but we’re working on it. I am hopeful that within the next year we will have one in place, whether that is on-premises or cloud or a hybrid of both.”

BLURRING THE LINESOrganizations need to develop a three-pronged strategy for on-premises, off-premises, and cloud, says Jim Guinn, managing director at consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. “You really

With bring-your-own-cloud quickly gaining ground, organizations will soon have to define what is forbidden for employees to utilize and what isn’t. By Robert L. Mitchell

What’s YourCloud LOC?

n FEATURE | BRING YOUR OWN CLOUD


model where the user must back out of one account bay and enter another to view and edit documents. Office ap-plications can save to either folder. And if the user copies a document from his personal SkyDrive folder into the Sky-Drive Pro folder, that file will be copied back to the cloud, where the policies for that document library will apply. But only in the cloud. While IT can control which files users can sync with SkyDrive Pro, the cloud service can’t control what users do with the locally stored versions of those files. Users either must work with sensitive files in the cloud only or use Office 2013’s In-formation Rights Management feature to control forwarding, copying or print-ing of specific documents. “Clearly, there’s a lot of change coming where IT has to integrate these [personal cloud services] into the current stack and fig-

ure out how it will work together,” says Amit Singh, president of the enterprise unit at Google, which in recent years has added enterprise features to con-sumer-based cloud applications such as Google Docs. With the latter, individual documents can be shared between the controlled, auditable professional ac-count, and the user’s personal account. But Docs offers no unified document view. On the other hand, Google Plus, Singh says, “was imagined as a semiper-meable layer where we add controls for the enterprise from the bottom up.”

THE TASK AT HAND FOR ITBut not all consumer-based cloud apps will necessarily be expanded to support enterprise security and compliance needs. As the personal and professional worlds continue to blur, IT will have to adapt. Users will want to use some of their own personal cloud-based pro-ductivity tools, so for better or worse, IT will need to support mainstream personal cloud apps—including Drop-box, says Gillett. Going forward, he says, “you need to look at integrating employees’ personal cloud apps and

need to pay attention to how you secure documents that are in someone else’s cloud-based service,” he says.

Roman says some documents just don’t belong in popular cloud storage services. “I’ve read the whitepapers on Dropbox and Box. I guess they’re secure,” he says. But for sensitive docu-ments, he adds, “we don’t want to risk it.” Even the issue of who owns business applications and how those applications are licensed is blurring. Evernote for Business, for example, adds a business services layer that includes policy-controlled business notebooks and adds business document libraries to the user’s personal Evernote account. Per-sonal and professional documents re-side in different repositories but with a unified view. “We’re seeing a transition from two completely separate worlds to a world where there is no line between

what’s good for personal and what’s good for business,” says Andrew Sinkov, vice president of marketing at Evernote. And if the user leaves the organization, the account—sans business documents—goes with him. “This model is little understood but I think will have a profound impact,” says Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research.

With Office 2013 and SkyDrive, Mi-crosoft has taken a small step toward creating a unified view of the user’s personal and professional worlds. It has created synchronized, local versions of the user’s SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro (SharePoint document library) storage repositories that exist as separate fold-ers on the user’s local desktop. In this way, Office 365 can create and modify documents in the cloud, Office 2013 can read and write to the same files in a local folder, and all changes will be synchronized. “There’s a convergence happening from the user’s point of view,” says Microsoft storyteller Steve Clayton. This strategy gets around the modal approach to personal and profes-sional workflows—the two-car-garage

data in the same way you connect with business partners today.” Ultimately, IT will have to stop worrying about how to control which applications people are using or where documents reside and focus on protecting the documents themselves, says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney. “Companies will just have to permit these things and take a differ-ent look at security,” he says, adding that IT will eventually embrace digital rights management schemes such as Microsoft’s Information Rights Management service.

“We’re working with Microsoft on ways to support that in a mobile con-text,” says Nicko van Someren, CTO at enterprise mobile management vendor Good Technology. But the market for the use of rights management servers to track and control content is still em-bryonic, he adds. While DRM has a bad reputation among consumers, the sys-tems could work for business, Dulaney says. He sees an evolution of products similar to WatchDox, which encrypts files that move outside of the enterprise space and requires that users have an authenticated reader app to view them. To this, IT might also need to add pub-lic key infrastructure systems and cer-tificates, Dulaney says.

But if the idea of DRM seems un-palatable—and expensive—the con-vergence of personal and professional clouds could leave IT organizations with few other options for protecting truly sensitive documents. IT depart-ments will also be faced with the chal-lenge of maximizing convenience while protecting those documents in a world where those assets need to exist on and move quickly between many different endpoint devices.

“These trends in consumer technol-ogy are so massive and supported by so many citizens that this is now the era of user-driven IT,” says Dulaney. “It’s not business-driven. The user gets to decide.” Skanska’s Roman says he has no illusions that he can ever completely control all of the applications and data created and shared in the cloud even though the company plans to offer of-ficial cloud alternatives and has strong policies about the use of sensitive docu-ments. Yes, you can put policies and tools in place. But ultimately, he says, “you have to trust your users.” n

Companies can put policies and tools in place to ensure security, but ultimately they will have to learn to trust their users.


n FEATURE | BRING YOUR OWN CLOUD

MENTION “CONSUM-ERIZATION of IT” and you’re likely to imagine people

bringing (or sneaking) their iPhones and iPads into work, with or without the blessing of their IT managers. There’s no disputing the BYOD movement has forced major changes in how IT is man-aged, and also how consum-

New trends in CoIT are changing how enterprises view consumer tech. By Jim Metzler

er-level IT devices are built and marketed. But devices aren’t the be-all and end-all of the consumerization of IT phenomenon, known as CoIT. The phenomenon also includes consumer data ser-vices and cloud storage; pub-licly available repositories of big data, which anyone (not just corporations) can use; open source and commercial

EVERYTHING ABOUT CoIT

FocalPoint

software for every conceiv-able application; and publicly used identity management systems such as using Face-book or other social networks as a single sign-on provider.

In short, CoIT is the adop-tion of any consumer-facing technology for business purposes. CoIT hasn’t just recently grown to encom-pass this broad swath of do-mains. The “new” areas have always been with us. It’s only just now that those other do-mains are getting the same attention, and forcing reas-sessments of how IT uses consumer technology.

Take a look at the various ways CoIT exists beyond BYOD policies, and how IT managers can get the most out of these ground-swells of change in con-sumer technology.

CoIT MANIFESTS ITSELFEmployees in IT-empow-ered workplaces have long lived with policies that restricted their behavior. In the early days of workplace computing, many of these restrictions were a mat-ter of practice, not policy. They stemmed more from the technology being rare and expensive—and thus impractical to bring in—than because of any ex-plicit restrictions on their use. One exception to that rule was software, since it was easy enough to bring in and could almost always be used without attracting undue attention (especially in the pre-network days). As IT became a fixture in the workplace, so did rules governing its use. But the overall trend for computing has been towards democ-ratization of access (most everyone can use it) and consumerization of form and delivery (most every-one can afford it). By the

raw numbers, CoIT-loving workers are actually in the minority. An IDC study found that on average only two out of every 10 workers surveyed preferred choos-ing their own devices. For-rester Research’s Forrsights Workforce Employee Sur-vey (from 2011) showed roughly the same numbers: One-fifth to one-fourth of IT workers wanted their own devices or used their own services. That said, what’s less clear is which 20 percent or so of the total workforce makes those de-mands. If they are workers who draw more pay, com-mand more influence, and provide a broader skill seg-ment, that relatively small percentage speaks with a much louder voice. In such cases, the employees are more able to demand—and receive—the IT solutions of their choice. And ultimately, the sheer ubiquity of con-sumer tech as a workplace staple means it’s better to embrace it now instead of being pushed aside later.

Several ongoing trends have continued to influence the way consumer IT enters and changes the workplace:Diverse devices and platforms. This doesn’t just mean smaller or more user-friendly devices— consumer technology means business. The consumerization of IT is about far more than just using your own smartphone at work although that certainly applies—but also new ways of interacting with those devices (touchscreens and their new touch-centric interfaces). The stark, no-nonsense first-generation BlackBerry, which appealed mainly to executives and tech-savvy users, has given way to lively, colorful, and

Face of Old ITThe New


powerfully interactive iOS- and Android-powered devices. If users have to spend their entire workday with a device, they’re more motivated to spend it with a device that appeals to them aesthetically. Never underestimate the power of an aesthetically appealing device, even if it has issues with management or security. Users tend to put their own comfort and convenience over the security and integrity of the organization as a whole, but that doesn’t rule out compromise. Growth of consumer-oriented sites and services. Workers now routinely use unauthorized websites or Internet services, including social networks and microblogs, as part of their jobs. Many of these tools are not simply being used for personal convenience, but for driving the core business itself—such as identifying customers or sales leads or accelerating existing business processes.Always make an ongoing effort to determine which services are in wide use and find ways to bring the most popular and useful sites into the way work is done—not simply blacklist them. Also, pay attention to how to separate legitimate and frivolous use of these services, and make sure the two don’t interfere with each other. Services that consume heavy amounts of bandwidth may be useful, but only to the extent they don’t crowd out other usage.Software technologies. This comes not just in the form of new applications, but in new ways of thinking about software itself. The rise in awareness of open source software, for

n FOCAL POINT | CoIT

example, has supplied the IT world with a massive culture of free and highly malleable applications, many of which come packaged in consumer-oriented editions (the Chrome Web browser, for example). Virtualization has also made it easier for IT workers to experiment safely with software that wouldn’t otherwise be allowed in work environments. IT managers should, whenever possible, encourage the use of virtualization for the sake of running software in a sandboxed environment. This minimizes the risk of using the software directly on a production machine, or allowing it access to a production network. That works especially well in work and home PC environments. Of course, virtualization doesn’t only mean running a Windows desktop environment on another device; in fact, that option works poorly on mobile devices. But other technologies are available—manageable software wrappers for corporate apps to restrict information flow, separate sandboxes for business and personal apps, and HTML5 front ends to enterprise

apps—that provide the desired separation.

THE UNDERLYING TRENDFew people reading this need to be told about how BYOD has changed how de-vices are used in the work-place. But BYOD is actually better thought of as being part of a larger trend: The self-provisioning of tech-nology. This trend, which persists through almost every technology category explored, is the accelerating pace of users picking the de-vices, software, and environ-ments that empower them, rather than having such things assigned to them by fiat. Here are a few ways IT admins can keep a handle on self-provisioned devices. Costs. One advantage of self-provisioned technology is that it gives workers the option to pay their own money for technologies that they would prefer to use. The obvious benefits—increased productivity and employee loyalty—are offset by potential problems of management and security. IT admins should always offer the option of self-purchased and self-provisioned technology, but with incentives for purchasing devices with specific

support provisions. Such incentives could be financial. Also, there should be clear definitions of how costs of service for the device are to be handled, which in itself could be used as an incentive. For example, the company could pick up the entire tab for both device and service for an approved device, but only pay for the cost of the service for an unapproved device.Jailbreaking. Technically savvy users who chafe at the restrictions imposed by locked-down devices some-times cut their own end runs around those barriers by jailbreaking or rooting those devices. Such devices no longer have to follow policy guidelines or soft-ware restrictions.To that end, there’s at least as much attention to end point secu-rity as there is device secu-rity, but perhaps additional behavioral compromises can be reached for workers with jailbroken devices. Us-ers could agree to have their devices segregated into a separately moderated sub-network, which allows them access to the same resources but at the cost of a higher de-gree of scrutiny. The major mobile device management products can detect jailbro-

UNOFFICIAL USE OF SOFTWARE AND SERVICES BY IT-ENABLED WORKERS

Non-authorized websites

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%Social

networkingRogue

softwareMicroblogging


JANUARY 1, 2009 CHANNELWORLD 33

ken devices, so IT can block their access or enforce their segregation from the trusted pool of devices.Device Life Cycles. The average lifetime for a given device—and in many cases a given software application—as accelerated, in some ways as an offset or a compensation for the slowing pace of change in desktop PCs. IT managers should note, though, that device life cycles are as much a function of the user as they are the device. A user satisfied with a given iteration is less likely to upgrade for the sake of upgrading, and can be counted on that much more to not contribute to added costs (either for provisioning new devices or support for same).

Finally, keep in mind there’s a rich culture of third-party device management tools and products, which can be drawn on as needed for both enterprise-approved and CoIT-enabled devices.

DEALING WITH CONSUMER SERVICESAlmost every service we think of as having a “consumer” facet has a “professional” facet as well—a higher tier of ser-vice aimed specifically at businesses. In fact, most of the business models for those services come from the for-pay, professionally oriented, premium-level version of the service. The lowcost or “freemium” user version of the service is a limited-value loss leader, an on ramp to attract enough paying customers to make the service sustainable. That said, many workers find that the freemium version of a service is not only more than enough for their purposes, but comes free of restrictions

that might be imposed by their own IT managers. It’s not enough for IT managers to provision the professional version of a consumer ser-vice for their workers; they should remain conscious of the fact that users may well try to use the free version of the same product (or a com-peting one).Social Networks. For any company large enough to have an IT department, a presence on and aggres-sive use of social networks is indispensable. Aside from being used to create intranet-like communities within companies, social networks also are used for promotional work, job recruitment, scouting for prospective business leads,

and customer-facing interac-tions.The most crucial thing is to set access policies on the use of corporate branded social-networking accounts. Those entrusted with these accounts should be well-trained in the responsible use of social media to avoid PR gaffes that could damage the company’s reputation; they should be PR people first and social networking people second.Data repositories. Ser-vices such as Dropbox and Box offer gigabytes of online storage that can be synched effortlessly be-tween clients. Many offer professional tiers of ser-vice: Box, in particular, has enterprise security features that include logging of user

behaviors, at-rest and in-transit encryption of data, global management func-tions, and an API platform to allow broad integration with common business solutions. These allow the service to become a func-tional part of the business, the way an organization might build infrastructure around Google Docs or Gmail. A department in-terested in setting up its own custom infrastructure through such a tool should be given a chance, but the keys to managing such infrastructure and final oversight should remain in the hands of a higher authority—for example, as a stopgap measure against allowing sensitive internal

Consumerization of IT and self-service trends will lead to a restructuring of

today’s IT shop, leaving behind a hybrid model consisting of tech consultants and integra-tors. “The business itself will be the IT department. [Tech-nologists] will simply be the enablers,” said Brandon Porco, chief technologist and solutions architect at Northrop Grumman.

Porco was part of a four-person panel of technologists who answered audience ques-tions during a meeting at the CITE Conference and Expo. Among concerns raised is whether IT is losing control as consumer technology becomes part and parcel of everyone’s work in the enterprise, and the datacenter is left behind.

Others said they are not sure how to address a growing generation gap between young and veteran workers, each of

whom are comfortable with dif-ferent technologies.

“Interns coming in for the summer are asked if they’re familiar with Google Apps. They say, ‘Of course we are,’” said Nathan McBride, vice president of IT and chief cloud architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals. “Then we have other employees coming in who worked for other companies who say, ‘I need Outlook.’ We have to say we don’t use that anymore.”

McBride said 75 Fortune 100 companies now use Google Apps along with most Ivy League schools, meaning that the next generation of workers won’t be users of Microsoft Exchange or Office.

In five years, McBride said, companies will have to ensure they’re matching their enabling technology to the demographic of that time. Kathleen Schaub, vice president of research firm IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice,

said many corporate IT organi-zations now report to the head of the business unit it’s assigned to.

“The premise is that wher-ever IT sits in an organization will dictate what they care about,” she said. “If they’re in finance, they’ll care about cost cutting. If they’re in op-erations, they’ll care about process management. If [the company] decides it wants to focus on the customer, they’ll put it in marketing.” While the CIO position will likely remain in an enterprise, his or her role will morph into a technology forecaster and strategist, rather than a technology implementer, according to Porco. “We’re not trying to be ahead of the technology curve and we don’t’ want to be behind, but we’re trying to maintain pace in order to know what they’re going to ask for next before they ask for it,” McBride said.

—Lucas Mearian

CoIT will Make IT Departments Irrelevant


34 CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 1, 2009

data to be leaked through such channels. Granted, this particular problem will nev-er have a perfect solution, but that’s no reason not to take what action you can.

CHANGES IN SOFTWARESoftware was one of the eas-iest things to sneak into the workplace during the early days of CoIT. Now, thanks to locked-down desktop environments and admin-istrative controls, it’s one of the hardest—but that doesn’t mean there’s no CoIT angle to software anymore. Consumer desktop apps. The line between what constitutes an “enterprise” app and a “personal” app continues to vanish. Barring the presence of

enterprise-level features in a given application, it’s the management features of the platform—user rights and permissions, for example—that make more of the dif-ference now.

The main thing to be on guard against is licensing violations, because some consumer software prod-ucts are licensed for use in non-commercial contexts only. Microsoft Office Home and Student edition, for ex-ample, is the less-expensive version of Microsoft Office that, as the name implies, is for home and student use, and cannot be used in a corporate environment per its license. On the other hand, Adobe Photoshop Ele-ments—the less-expensive downmarket edition of Pho-toshop, which omits features such as CMYK and Pantone

support—has a license that says it can be used in a busi-ness setting.Open source projects. Open source software projects are not inherently consumer-oriented, but that’s part of their power: They can be bent and shaped to fit a great many needs, both personal and commercial. Open source projects that are aimed mainly at users can be adapted to the enterprise and vice versa, such as KeePass, an open source password vault. Bear in mind that the cost of such adaptation (in both time and effort) is borne entirely by the IT.

It’s not enough for IT man-agers to provision the profes-sional version of a consumer service for their workers;

they should remain con-scious of the fact that users may well try to use the free version of the same prod-uct (or a competing one).department, unless you’re purchasing support for the app from a vendor or hiring a consultant. That said, open source requires no initial outlay for the software itself and has no restrictions on internal use or redistribution (its only restrictions are on how its source code is reused in other contexts).

NEW SCALE AND SCOPE“Big data”—the mas-sive amounts of data that gain new purpose when being analyzed for unin-tended uses, often by being mashed up—by itself is not new. Most any company of size has needed to per-form analytics and number-

crunching as part of its regu-lar operations using internal and external data. What is new is the scale and scope of that data, the affordability of the technology used to pro-cess it—both hardware and software—and the sources for that data.Public big data. The rise of commodity cloud infra-structures (Amazon Web Services, for example) has made it that much easier to aggregate large amounts of data sets harvested from academic, governmental, and commercial but freely licensed sources. Many of these data sets are useful as business tools—such as census data—and can be leveraged to save costs for not only IT but other parts

of the company.Open source data-manip-ulation infrastructures. Manipulating big data sets has become much easier thanks to storage, memory and processing all becom-ing cheaper. But another major advance has been the software used to store, pro-cess, and extract that data efficiently, especially when the data is stored across large numbers of machines. Hadoop (also incarnated as MapR) is one such applica-tion, an open source proj-ect with flexible licensing terms. CIOs need to know that such products aren’t replacements for desktop tools like Microsoft Excel, and can’t be leveraged in an afternoon. Although the software itself is typically free, the time and effort re-quired to make proper use

of it should be considered an investment and not just an expense.Social data and feedback. Data culled from responses provided through social net-works can also be useful. Be-cause social network double as identity-management tools for many people, that reduces the amount of work needed to be done to sanitize the data or screen out fraudulent or duplicate submissions.

IDENTITY MANAGEMENT Centralized identity ser-vices in the enterprise have typically been used to access internal resourc-es—such as signing on to workstations or reading e-mail. Now they’re being extended to speak to ex-ternal services as well via third-party identity provid-ers that are both consumer- and business-oriented.Third-party identity pro-viders exist in two basic incarnations: Systems and services. Systems consist of methods like OpenID, which is simply a standard that can be implemented by anyone and exists in any number of free imple-mentations (both in terms of cost and licensing). A commercially implemented system would be something like Symplified, which provides a single internal sign-on that can be used with external apps such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Box, and more than a thousand others. Services include Facebook, which may be widely recognized as a way to assert an iden-tity online, but is ultimately controlled by a single, com-mercial authority. Such services are best confined to environments that aren’t mission-critical—for ex-ample, an informal employ-ees’ group could be hosted

The line that differentiates an enterprise app from a personal app is the management features of the platform that make more of a difference now.

n FOCAL POINT | CoIT


JANUARY 1, 2009 CHANNELWORLD 35

on Facebook. A system like Symplified could be used to sign on to Facebook if needed, but Facebook itself would be a poor primary sign-on choice for even a CoIT-friendly environ-ment. The primary sign-on should always be some-thing that can be directly controlled in-house, not something that exists at the behest of another company that owns the platform and has no explicit SLA with your business.

IT departments should keep an eye out for move-ment towards standardized APIs for identity manage-ment (via the Initiative for Open Authentication). This may well preclude the use of passwords entirely: A smart card or token (even a smartphone) plus a biomet-ric, for example, could be used in lieu of a conventional password. That said, these aren’t expected to become commonplace until another consumerized technology trend takes off: The integra-tion of near-field technologies in smartphones.

Business with budgets too small for physical token or biometrics can still take advantage of a few consumer identity-management prod-ucts to good effect. LastPass, a password- and credential-management system that in-tegrates into Web browsers, also has an enterprise-level edition with administrative controls. KeePass has been deployed in enterprise settings and has a rich cul-ture of third-party add-ons that allow easier enterprise integration.

CREATE AN ENVIRONMENTConsumerization of IT isn’t likely to vanish, but it also isn’t likely to completely displace conventional cor-porate IT products. What’s

more likely is a future wave of products that sport two faces—professional and consumer—and can be used in both contexts, even at the same time. To keep from be-ing broadsided by that future, here are some forward-look-ing recommendations for IT managers and CIOs.Make and maintain ac-ceptable use policies about CoIT-able products. Workers should have one place to go where they can find a rundown of what is and isn’t permissible as far as bringing in one’s own IT resources. These policies should cover devices as well as software brought in from the outside, consumer ser-vices accessed through work IT resources, third-party

data, and so on. Not all of it may be relevant now, but it might be soon, which is why it’s crucial to start that con-versation early.Develop and maintain a balance between self-provisioned and assigned use of resources. Figure out what sorts of consumer-ized IT products are fine as is and which need explicit management. For example, in your environment, which would be more potentially disruptive: A worker who brings in his own iPhone, or a worker who sets up a departmental Box account? Which would need more oversight? Which would open up that many more opportunities in your busi-ness? No two IT depart-ments are going to have the same answers to these questions, nor should they.

And remember that where risk is involved, IT cannot be the sole decider or enforcer; business management needs to help determine acceptable risk and manage and enforce compliance. That’s part of the responsibility users take on when they self-provision and drive technology choices.Create an inner core of enterprise resources, with processes for con-necting to consumer-ized offerings. The most crucial, bedrock-layer parts of your business processes should be built on enter-prise products whenever possible. The edges can be a zone for experimentation, where CoIT takes root. Be-tween those two domains should be a buffer zone, a

set of procedures and stan-dards that allow resources to be moved safely back and forth. It should always be possible for the two to talk to each other, but never at the expense of your core se-curity and manageability.Compartmentalize everything that needs regulatory compliance. Any business that exists in an industry governed by regulatory oversight needs to be doubly conscious of how CoIT can create giant loopholes. The individual is still the main consumer for CoIT offerings, not the en-terprise—especially not the regulated enterprise.

CoIT BUILDS BUSINESSCoIT is such a broad phe-nomenon that it’s tough to narrow down its impor-tance to any one pivotal

element. One thing that does stand out, and should guide the future use of CoIT, is how it affects the relationship between users and the IT staff. The major-ity of the heavy lifting for IT management falls to the CIO and the IT team—the former to plan, the latter to execute. The growth of CoIT changes the picture drastically, as it allows users much more leeway to execute their own IT plan. This goes double for expert users—people who in the absence of an IT department would be able to do their own IT support. In fact, sometimes they become the de facto IT support in en-vironments where the users feel at odds with their own IT departments. This isn’t

a new phenomenon, but the acceleration of CoIT makes it all the more prominent.Because of these potential disparities and imbalances, IT staff members owe it to themselves to find out how to share the responsibility for managing this brave new world of consumerized IT. Securing the help of expert users who aren’t themselves IT staff is one way to do it, because they’re in the trenches and can provide exactly the kind of uncen-sored, real-world feedback that’s most needed. Over time, more CoIT technolo-gies will become dual-use technologies, with facets for both enterprise management and personal use. But until that becomes commonplace, you’ll need to continue en-suring that the IT part of CoIT is done right. n

It is difficult to narrow down one pivotal aspect of CoIT. But what stands out, and should guide the future use of CoIT, is how it affects the relationship between users and the IT staff.


n OPINION

Lost in Translation

I RECENTLY MISINTERPRETED some CEO cost-speak. The enormous gap between what I thought I was hearing and what the CEOs were actually saying is tremendously illustrative and well worth looking at. I was involved, albeit

tangentially, in a dozen executive searches for new CIOs. All of these searches were being led by CEOs of global, brand-name, Fortune 300 companies. In fact, nine of the companies were in the Fortune 100. In my experience, such leaders are enlightenedand appreciative of the value of IT. That’s why I was surprised—shocked, actually—to find that every one of these CEOs ranked IT cost management among the top three capabilities they were looking for in their next CIO. I couldn’t understand it. How could that be when just about everything one reads in the business press and from subscription research firms claims that growth is the primary focus for top com-panies’ leaders? What was going on? Could it be that, against astounding odds, I had stumbled into a thicket of Luddites mas-querading as modern leaders? No; the job requirements crafted by these CEOs were not outliers. I talked to three of the CIO communities I manage and learned that IT cost management is at or near the top of most CEOs’ expectations of their CIOs.

But the way that I was reading “IT cost management” is far removed from how the CEOs were thinking about that concept. I was afraid that new CIOs were going to be hired on the expectation that they would be frenzied, anti-technology, chainsaw-wield-ing cost-cutters. All of the visions I have ever had of CIOs using technology to help their companies move in new and profit-able directions were going up in smoke. But no. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the CEOs were looking for someone who deeply understood IT cost drivers and the relationship between opti-mized IT infrastructure and innovation. In

other words, the kind of cost management these CEOs had in mind involved the CIO managing an updated and future-looking IT platform as a possible source of fund-ing for new initiatives. Quite simply, I had equated cost management with cost reduction. But CEOs don’t want to spend less on IT; they want to spend smarter on IT. CEOs see new technology as a way to lower costs and increase competitiveness. They have come to realize that IT is the new basis of competition and that without an up-to-date technology platform, they can’t compete. They are, it would seem, channeling Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie, the great steel magnate of the 19th century, believed in investing aggressively in the latest technology, as business historian H.W. Brands re-lates in The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s. Carnegie believed that ev-ery month his company used outdated equipment was a month forever lost to inefficiency. Upon hearing how British steelmakers prided themselves on wring-ing the last ton of steel out of dated equip-ment, he scoffed: “That is what is the matter with the British steel trade. Most British equipment is in use 20 years after it should have been scrapped.”

Carnegie was right. During the 1880s, costs were halved, output doubled, and profits rose. What are you waiting for? Get out there and re-platform something. n

When CEOs expect cost management from their CIOs, it is often confused with cost reduction and an aversion to IT. On the contrary, they just want CIOs to spend smarter and innovate better.

Thornton A. May is author of The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics and executive director of the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College in Jacksonville. You can contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter (@deanitla).

THORNTON A. MAY


SPOKEWE

LISTENED

YOU

and now we bring the best for you

http://partners.dlink.co.inLogin Now

TOOLS THAT WILL MAKE YOU A WINNER

. PRODUCT SELECTOR PRO. GUI EMULATOR PRO. BANDWIDTH AND CAPACITY CALCULATOR PRO. TECHNOLOGY BRIEF. UTILITY TOOLS.. SOLUTION GUIDES. PRODUCT GUIDE. HOW TO GUIDES. PRODUCT DEMO CLIPS. INFORMATIONAL VIDEO CLIPS

. D-LINK CERTIFICATION INFORMATION. CASE STUDIES. PRESS RELEASES. DIGITAL LIBRARY OF PRODUCT EDMS.. SCHEME INFORMATION. EVENTS CALENDAR. NEWS LETTERS. D-LINK ACADEMYAND MANY MORE...

channelworld magazine july 2013

Documents

page 22emc2

trademarks of emc corporation

virtualization technologies

emc logo

tough times

world war

best forms of innovation

best form of innovation