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Guru talk: D. Ravi Kumar, Acropetal VC Talk: Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst

Satish Kumar, CEO

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The Smart Tech ie |5|N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 0

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The Smart Tech ie |6|O c t o b e r 2 0 1 0

Contents - November 2010

COVER STORY

[Technology] 36Choosing the CRM Solution forYour BusinessBy Team Talisma

3810 Best Practices for EffectiveApplication Management in aVirtual EnvironmentBy Edgardo Salinas Contreras,Quest Software

40Successful Integration of Technol-ogy in Schools- Opportunities andChallengesBy Sanjiv Pande, NIIT

42The Power of Real-Time InformationBy Roger Li, Oracle

44Technologies Driving CloudComputingBy Saji Thoppil, Wipro

46Diversity inTechnologyLeadershipBy Ajay Pal Singh Arora, SociétéGénérale

48Bridging theGapGetting the StudentsIndustryReadyBy Srinivasan Viswanathan, Datsi

50Mobile BusinessApplicationsNextAd-vancement inMobile ConvergenceBy Rajamani Srinivasan, SAP IndianSub-continent

[Technology] 52Smartphone PopularityADouble EdgeSword for SecurityBy Vishak Raman, Fortinet

[Event] 54SiliconindiaCreates ITSecurityAware-ness@SecurityConference 2010By Eureka Bharali

[Tech Products] 56

[People Manager] 58Focusing on Possibilities & Oppor-tunitiesBy C Mahalingam,Symphony Services

[Technology] 60How toChoose a SaaS-Based ITServ-iceManagement SolutionBy Bob Johnson, BMC Software

[Guru Talk] 8

BuildingUpAMediumScaleOrganisationBy D. Ravi Kumar, Acropetal

[In Focus] 10

[Tech Buzz] 14

[VC Talk] 16TheNeed of theHour: EntrepreneurshipinCleanEnergyBy Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst

[Venture Beat] 17

[Feature] 24India to Grab the Infrastructure Man-agement Services MarketBy Binu Paul

[Company Spotlight] 30IndianTelecom Industry Sees A Satura-tion Point Ahead?By Vimali Swamy

[Technology]34IndianTelecom Industry Sees A Satura-tion Point Ahead?By Binu Paul

35CyberAttacksEnterprisesfarfromEquipped!By Renjith VP

D. Ravi Kumar

18

Appnomic 26In�nite 27inTarvo 28Maintec Technologies 29

GLOPORE IMSStrengthening

the Global IMSFootprint

By Vimali SwamySatish Kumar, CEO

25

The Smart Tech ie |9|N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 0The Smart Tech ie |8|N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 0

Building up a medium scale organization needs a focused ap-proach to meet the end goals, which in turn need to be clearlydefined right at the onset. While approach and execution de-pend on various external factors, they can be refined with timeto better meet and suit the needs of the organization and its

clients.Having said that, building a medium scale organization can be challeng-

ing with constant concerns regarding funding, talent and clients. There must beseveral organizations that have fallen prey to inadequate plans and derisory im-plementation. The funding is the biggest concern and reason for most ventures

not reaching the next levels in growth. In this phase where the organization hasjust been set up, talent acquisition is another big concern. Talent acquisition and

retention in the face of larger competitors is difficult and tricky. Challenges likethese are real and faced everyday in the initial term of the business.

In this globalized economy organizations are at a greater risk for repercussionsthat canmake or break development. The challenge then arises in aligning your goalswith

those of your global clients. The fact that our revenues are interlinked with that of an-other economy makes it tougher to survive global economic meltdowns, such

as the one experienced in the past few years. While larger organizationshave the funds and the diversifications to help tide over a downturn,the medium and smaller enterprises can be severely affected.

Concerns on a local and global scale make sustained growth inany organization a constant battle. Steps need to be taken that canbridge the need of the present with the growth and developmentplans for the future.An organization needs to align its growth to itslong term goals and is consciously taking steps in that direction.The resources, diversification and the strategic decisions are all intune with the end goal; that of growth and success.

While there are no sure shot formulas of success and develop-

ment, my experience shows that successand development of organizations de-pend on certain basics. These basicsover a period of time become integral tothe identity of the organization and alsohelp set it apart from others.

Although these may vary by a fewdegrees; Talent, Values, Commitment toClients, Quality, Investment in Technol-ogy and Corporate Governance are whatmost successful organizations are builton. These basics are what take a smallorganization to the next step, that ofgrowing into a medium to large organi-zation.

Our world is increasingly dependenton the soft skills of its employees andtalent is of foremost importance for asuccessful organization. Identifying andhiring correct talent is a part battle. Thekey factor here is the organizationalvalue proposition that helps attract freshtalent. The other, and extremely criticalin Information Technology, is retainingthat talent. While most organizationswage a headhunting battle, it is criticalthat the parent organization takes stepsto prevent the loss of talent. It should beensured that employees feel valued andappreciated and that this feeling is preva-lent among all tiers of your organization.Employee inclusion in the developmentof organization, its values, and visioncan majorly influence retention. It is es-sential to give importance to the em-ployee feedback and take that intoconsideration for various organization-wide initiatives. Employees need to betreated as enablers. They are the oneswho can work towards the shared com-mon goal of achieving success and trans-form an organization by attracting moretalent, giving optimal performances, andinfusing new ideas into the system. Var-ious mentoring programmes keep tal-ented employees engaged and also helpthem learn from experienced profes-sionals in other departments.

Values help administer the opera-tions of an organization. If values aremere words that employees do not as-sociate with, then they are of little use.

It is imperative to promote these valuesand integrate them into our dailyprocesses.Another way of looking at itis to absorb the basic approved princi-ples that your employees work on andinstill them as organizational values.This guarantees that in the long run em-ployees will always make decisions orat least know to make decisions basedon these core beliefs.

It is my belief that it does not mat-ter how large or small your organiza-tion is, all that truly matters is howcommitted are you to your clients. Bycommitment I not only mean the time-lines and your dedication to the project,but also communication between thetwo parties. Project managers shouldcommunicate openly with clients re-garding all aspects of the project. Theyneed to understand in-depth what theclient wants and needs. This commit-ment leads to a better understandingand in turn allows you to offer the bestsolution. Flexible solutions, offeringnewer technologies, and open commu-nication go a long way in ensuring thata client is assured of effective and effi-cient services on a long term basis.

Quality is the critical aspect of sus-tained organizational growth. Certifica-tions like the ISO impart confidence toclients that basic systems are in place fordelivery processes and that there is as-sured product quality. Quality then needsto be applied towards continual im-provement and in setting systems ap-proach. Your end product, process andtechnologywhen integrated on this base,will help achieve constant augmentation.

To ensure continued success andgrowth of the organization, one needs tofocus on growth in competency based

verticals. This will allow you to build ondomain expertise and bring competen-cies to better delivery and service ap-proaches. Investments into newer andmore advanced technologies and devel-opments also enable organizations to bebetter prepared for changing global re-quirements. Sectors like Healthcare andEnergy and Environment, which aregaining momentum in India, but have

considerable reach elsewhere, ascertainsustained growth. These investmentshave a global appeal in terms of rev-enues, geographic spread and technicalexpertise. This investment in technolo-gies of the future is necessary and yet hasto help your organization reach that sin-gle end goal.

Corporate Governance is the finalbut most vital building block in the riseof an organization. We have all wit-nessed the meteoric rise and fall of sev-eral organizations just because theylacked in proper governance. There haveto be audits that check for accountability,transparency and the roles of variousmanagement personnel and strategic al-liances and partners. The corporate gov-ernance will ultimately help you reachyour organizational long term goals bycontrolling processes and operations towork for benefitting your stakeholdersboth internal and external.

An organization can be on the fasttrack to success if and only if the plan-ning, implementation and the re-sources all are focused in providingthe necessary push to take the organi-zation to the next level. The basics dis-cussed in this article, are like the dotson the map that help you accomplishyour organizational growth faster andreach your destination sooner.

A Medium ScaleBuilding Up

Organisation

The author is Chairman & MD, Acropetal Technologies

GURU TALK By D. Ravi Kumar

D. Ravi Kumar

Values help administer the operations of anorganization. If values are mere words thatemployees do not associate with, then they areof li/le use.


in in

Two software engineering cen-tres set up by the Defence Re-search and Development

Organization (DRDO), in Bangaloreand New Delhi, with 50 scientists areworking towards creating a futuristiccomputing system including India’sown operating system. “There aremany gaps in our software areas; par-ticularly we don’t have our own oper-ating system,” said V.K. Saraswat,ScientificAdviser to the Defence Min-ister and DRDO Director-General.“India currently uses operating sys-tems developed by western countries.In today’s world where you havetremendous requirements of securityon whatever you do, economy, bank-ing or defence, it’s essential that you

need to have an operating system” hesaid. Referring to reports of cyber at-tacks in recenttimes and “sus-ceptibility” ofi n t e r n e t ,Saraswat notedinstances of“data taken awayby adversaries”.“With a home-grown sys-tem, thes o u r c ecode willbe with us and it helps insecuring our systems,” he said.

The Defence Research and Devel-opment Organization has collaborated

with Indian Institute of Science, IndianInstitute of Technology Madras and

the Centre for Develop-ment of Telematics, be-sides universities andindustries for the fulfill-ment of the project. Thoughthe time frame and cost ofdevelopment is yet to bedisclosed, the new operat-ing system would be madeavailable for commercialuse. DRDO has a “com-

plete framework” on theproposed commercial arm,

which is expected to be operationalnext year. This arm would customizeand provide to the civil population thespin-offs of defense technologies.

IInnddiiaa ttoo HHaavvee IIttss OOwwnn OOSS

Harvard Business School (HBS)has received a $50 million giftfrom Tata Group for the fund-

ing of a new academic and residentialbuilding on the school’s Boston cam-pus for participants in the school’sbroad portfolio of executive educationprograms. HBS hopes to break groundfor the building next spring will nameit Tata Hall.

Ratan Tata, Chairman of the TataGroup, made the gift on behalf of theTata Companies, the Sir Dorabji TataTrust, and the Tata Education and De-velopment Trust, the philanthropic en-tities of the Tata Group. This $50

million donation fromTata makes it thelargest gift the schoolhas received from aninternational donor inits 102-year history.

An alumnus ofHBS, Ratan Tata at-tended the School’sAdvanced Manage-ment Program — oneof three comprehen-sive leadership pro-grams offered by HBS ExecutiveEducation — in 1975. He received theSchool’s highest honor, the Alumni

Achievement Award, in1995.

Nitin Nohria, Dean ofHBS hailed the donationas a “historic gift” andsaid his focus will be onbusiness ethics, a causehe has long championed,particularly during the fi-nancial crisis.

Earlier last month,Anand Mahindra, Head ofthe Mahindra Group too

gave the school $10 million. He hadtaken graduate and postgraduate de-grees there.

Tata Gifts $50 Million to Harvard Business School

Ratan Tata

With over 150,000 skilledanimators, Indian anima-tion industry is currently a

$1 billion industry but is expectedto grow at a compounded an-nual rate of 30 percent andreach a market size of $1.7billion by 2012 with over450,000 skilled animators.

A study conducted bythe Associated Chambersof Commerce and Industry(Assocham) shows that thedomestic animation industrywill undertake all its production ac-tivities within India instead ofspending its funds in U.S., Canada,Malaysia and the Philippines formaking advanced animated movies.According to the Associated Cham-ber of Commerce and Industry theindustry in foreign countries aregrowing at a high rate because of thespecial policies and initiatives of the

governments and they urged the gov-ernment to help the industry by giv-ing them adequate funding, guidanceon manpower de-

velopment andrecognition ofthe animation

courses.By recog-nizing ani-m a t i o ncourses, studentsand youths willconveniently getthe bank loans

which aremissing atpresent, As-s o c h a madded.

T h e i rs t u d ys h o w e dI n d i a

would needmore skilled pro-

fessionals like creative an-imators, conceptualizer,

visualizer, 3D modellers, char-acter designer and digital effect

artists to handle multimedia soft-ware like 3D studio Max, Maya

and Tictactoon. The chamber alsoexpressed concerns that the growthmight be restricted due to the short-age of manpower and specializedtraining institutes, lack of govern-ment funding, hi-tech studios and taxincentives.

Indian Animation Industry to Reach $1.7 Billion by 2012

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Mergers and acquisitions(M&A) deal value in Indiahas reached a record high of

$44.2 billion so far this yearAccordingto a report by mergermarket, an M&Aintelligence service provider, M&A ac-tivities in India generally saw signifi-cant improvement in the past threequarters with 183 deals worth $44.2 bil-lion announced, the increase was 24.5percent in volume terms and 312.9 per-cent in terms of deal value. “We expectto see a lot more strategic activity inIndia as private equity players shy awayfrom the sky-high valuations being de-manded by shareholders,” said AnjaliNaik, Deputy Editor - APAC, merger-market. She also added that the con-sumer, travel and hospitality sector maysee a large number of M&A deals and

Indiamay trade into

newer territoriesin the coming

months. The Government’s auction of 3G

and broadband wireless access (BWA)spectrums worth $11.009 billion and$5.473 billion, respectively contributedsignificantly to the deal tally. A sectorwise analysis shows that the technol-ogy, media and telecom sectors lead themarket with 47.3 percent of the totalM&A deal value till date, while, the en-ergy, mining and utilities sector, came

second with 26.3 percentin deal value for the first

three quarters of 2010,the report

said. According to the report,

Rothschild decorated the topspot on the financial advisorsleague table in the first three

quarters of 2010, as it advised on M&Atransactions with a total value of $27.4billion, while, Ernst & Young toppedthe deal count financial advisers tableby advising on 18 deals. Some of theannounced deals so far this year includethe $10.7-million Bharti-Zain deal,Vedanta’s 60 percent stake buy in CairnIndia worth $9.1 million, the $3.7-mil-lion Abbott Laboratories-PiramalHealthcare deal.

in

M&A on High-Tide inIndia With DealsWorth $44.2 Billion

in

The ‘IT in the Healthcare In-dustry - Emerging Trends andMarket Opportunities in

India’ report from Springboard Re-search shows that the Indian health-care IT spending is to grow from $274.2 million in 2009 to $ 609.5 mil-lion in 2013. “The spending on basiccomputing products is expected toincrease over the next five years, ashospitals build and upgrade their ITinfrastructure”, noted Tulika Sheel,Analyst, Vertical Industries atSpringboard Research. “Moreover,with new and upcoming applicationssuch as telemedicine and e-prescrip-tions penetrating the healthcare ver-tical in India, IT investments onsoftware would further increase witha focus on integrated billing and on-

line availability of patient recordsacross hospitals”, she added.

According to the report, 23 per-cent of the healthcare respondentswho currently use or plan to useCloud Computing cited “reducedhardware infrastructure costs” aswell as “simplified resource andserver provisioning” as the primaryreasons for adoption. At the sametime, factors that are delaying theadoption of Cloud Computing in theindustry are high initial investment,integration with existing systemsand lack of knowledge. The reportstates that Healthcare InformationSystem (HIS) is the largest IT solu-tion implemented in healthcare anddrives majority of the tier 1 privateenterprise investments, with major-

ity of respondents citing implement-ing HIS.

Another 28 percent of respon-dents stated Process Automation andBusiness Alignment, and Integration(within and outside of the organiza-tion) to be their primary pain point,overruling concerns over data man-agement and storage. “Vendors inthe healthcare vertical should lookto offer industry specific solution in-cluding back-end and front-end ap-plications and involve clinicalmembers to actively participate andunderstand the solution and its im-pact on the hospitals for better clin-ical services,” said NilotpalChakravarti, Research Manager,Vertical Industries at SpringboardResearch.

Indian Healthcare IT Spending to Reach $ 609.5 Million by 2013

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Nov 27, 2010 PuneJan 22, 2010 New Delhi

India has been ranked as the 88th

country among the 110 countriesranked in the 2010 Legatum Pros-

perity Index. The prosperity index isbased on 89 variables over 110 coun-tries, grouped into eight sub-indexes,and claims to comprehensively rankthe level of prosperity in 110 nationsof the world. “The Legatum ProsperityIndex is the world’s only global as-sessment of wealth and well being. Ituses a holistic definition of prosperity,which includes factors ranging fromeconomic growth to health and educa-tion, to personal freedom and gover-nance,” said Ashley Lenihan, LegatumInstitute’s Senior Fellow.

The London-based Legatum Insti-tute that compiled the index hadranked India at the 78th position intheir 2009 rankings; the countryslipped 10 positions to its presentrank. Poor rankings in Social Capitaltogether with Health care, Entrepre-neurship and opportunity, and Educa-tional system constituted to thiscollapse in rank. According to theindex India’s inflation rate of 8.4 per-cent, which is around the global aver-age, and a high gross domesticsavings rate of 34.3 percent indicatesa relatively stable national economy,and the country, despite current lowstandards of living, is growing

steadily. This helped India to achieveits top spot in the sub-index by beingthe 44th in Economy. India got rankedfifth from the bottom at 105th positionin the Social Capital sub-index mak-ing this the country’s lowest sub-index rank.

In the list lead by Norway and fol-lowed by Denmark (2), Finland (3),Australia (4) and New Zealand (5), theU.S. came at the 10th position whileUK came at 13. India’s close neighborChina is ranked at 58th while Nepaland Pakistan are 91st and 109th respec-tively. The last country on the list andthe only country that came after Pak-istan was Zimbabwe (110).

India 88th on 2010 Legatum Prosperity Index


Ashish Rajpal

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Sociètè Gènèrale Global Solution Centre (SG GSC), asubsidiary of the France based Sociètè Gènèrale Group,as part of their CSR initiative has expressed interests inaddressing the issue of employability skill gap. In anattempt to nullify the employability skill gap in Indiathey have launched a unique scholarship program - ‘SGGSC India Talent Scholarship’, which promote pro-fessional education for students with financial con-straints. The scholarship includes the fee for thecomplete duration of the course; including tuition,boarding and lodging.

This academic year, SG GSC offered scholarships to11 students from Indian Institute of Management; Ban-galore, Indian Institute of Management; Kozhikode, andInternational Institute of Information Technology; Ban-galore. SG GSC will also assign a mentor from theirsenior leadership team, who will maintain regular con-tact with the student, acting as a ‘friend, philosopherand guide’, as well as monitor their progress.

“India has tremendous intellectual capital whichdoesn’t surface in view of lack of the ability of the in-dividual to afford exposure through good renowned In-dian Institutes. It is SG GSC’s attempt to make thispossible for few highly deserving students through fi-nancial assistance”, says Nippi Kochhar, CEO of So-ciètè Gènèrale Global Solution Centre.

AAllccaatteell--LLuucceenntt sseettss uupp aanneeww RRDDCC BBaannggaalloorreeAlcatel-Lucent has opened a new regional deliverycenter (RDC) in Bangalore providing services tomanage, operate and maintain multi-vendor fixedand mobile telecommunications networks based inIndia or around the world. “Our new center housessophisticated systems, equipment and personnel tomanage our customers’ network operations so theycan concentrate on their core business, while re-ducing operating expenses and increasing networkquality.” says Vivek Mohan, President ServicesBusiness for Alcatel-Lucent.

The Bangalore center is staffed with more than 100network operations specialists and is already providinground-the-clock services for more than 10 customers.The company as a whole currently manages more than90 networks supporting more than 220 million sub-scribers worldwide. Alcatel-Lucent’s major clients in-clude service providers like Reliance Communication,AT&T, Vivacom, Bharti Airtel and BT Global Services.

NNookkiiaa SSiieemmeennss NNeettwwoorrkkssbbrriinnggss TTDD--LLTTEE ttoo IInnddiiaaNokia Siemens Networks, a global enabler of telecommu-nications services, demonstrated the Time Division Duplexversion of LTE (TD-LTE) using broadband wireless access(BWA) spectrum in India. They demonstrated high-defini-tion video streaming and three-way video conferencing. In-teroperable TD-LTE dongles from Samsung were used toachieve a peak throughput speed of 110 megabits per second(Mbps) and low latency in the range of 10-20 milliseconds.The company’s Flexi Multiradio Base Station and EvolvedPacket Core were the base of the end to end demonstration.

The first video call by Gurdeep Singh, chief operatingofficer of Aircel, was conducted with the 4G mobile tech-nology running on commercial hardware at the NokiaSiemens Networks’ Bangalore R&D facility. TD-LTE tech-nology ensures high-speed mobile broadband connectivityand a superior performance from mobile applications acrossa wide range of devices. “Our TD-LTE trials across theglobe prove our capability in driving rapid commercial TD-LTE network deployments aimed at facilitating a new waveof advanced mobile broadband services.” says Juha Lap-palainen, head of mobile broadband sales at Nokia SiemensNetworks.

The company is working towards TD-LTE developmentand commercialization, is fully prepared and committed tosupport the LTE activities. To achieve this, the company isin talks with many operators globally. They are actively par-ticipating in tests and trials for both Frequency Division Du-plex LTE (FD-LTE) and TD-LTE technologies, whileworking with telecom operators and device manufacturers tostrengthen the network.

Lattice Semiconductor launched its third-generationmixed-signal devices, the Platform Manager family. Con-sisting of two devices, the LPTM10-1247 and LPTM10-12107, LPTM10-1247 device monitors 12 voltage railsand supports 47 digital I/O, while the LPTM10-12107monitors up to 12 voltage rails and supports 107 digitalI/O. It is expected to simplify board management designsignificantly by integrating programmable analog and logicto support many common functions, like power manage-ment, digital housekeeping and glue logic. By integratingthese support functions, Platform Manager devices can re-duce the cost of these functions compared to traditional ap-proaches, improve system reliability and provide a highdegree of design flexibility that minimizes the risk of cir-cuit board re-spins. The product is available at commer-cial and industrial temperature ranges. High volume ofLPTM10-1247 device in a 128-pin TQFP package ispriced at $3.75.

NNaattiioonnaall IInnssttrruummeennttssllaauunncchheess LLaabbVVIIEEWW 22001100National Instruments, a developer of automated testequipments and virtual instrumentation software, haslaunched LabVIEW 2010, a graphical programming en-vironment used to develop measurement, test, and con-trol systems. According to the company, LabVIEW2010 with its new features, like off-the-shelf compilertechnologies that execute code an average of 20 percentfaster, will reduce time. LabVIEW 2010 provides a newhardware configuration tool with which users can ac-cess and configure their LabVIEW Real-Time remotelyvia a Web browser. With the new LabVIEW, engineersand scientists can trace the implementation of test sys-tem requirements to virtual instrument (VI) programsand monitor low-level details about the execution ofcritical VIs for quick application monitoring and de-bugging.

According to Jayaram Pillai, Managing Director -India, Russia and Arabia, National Instruments “Weaim to empower Indian engineers through user-defined,software-based approach for developing test, control,and embedded applications and the India LabVIEWConference facilitate the exchange of information andideas about innovative advances in technology and ourproducts,”. Presently National Instrument supports over130 SMEs in the country. “With the flexible pricing forthe Indian customers, the company aims to cater thegrowing SMEs in India.” says Pillai.

Compiled By Hari Anil

NNeeww mmiixxeedd--ssiiggnnaall ddeevviicceessffrroomm LLaattttiiccee SSeemmiiccoonndduuccttoorr

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Unlike traditional energyand much like technol-ogy, clean energy of-fers an opportunity forentrepreneurs to play a

significant role in contributing to theIndian economy. From a macroeco-nomic standpoint, clean energy offersan opportunity for India to createmanufacturing and infrastructurejobs, potentially many times morethan the few lakh jobs created by the

technology sector in the late 1990s.The keys to unlocking this entrepre-neurship opportunity are to under-stand the unique demand drivers ofthis sector, and to de-risk the chal-lenges by building a diverse team thathas local operational expertise andglobal technological leadership.

The demand drivers for clean en-ergy in India are very different fromthose in the U.S. The thrust comesnot from a need to stop climatechange, but primarily from a need tobuild an energy secure future. The in-vestment commission of India claimsan average supply demand gap of 9percent and peak gap of 14 percent.During a late monsoon season, muchlike the most recent one, acute elec-tricity shortages are present in thoseparts of the country dependent onhydro power. Ultra mega coal plantsand imported oil & gas cannot solveall the problems. Recognizing this,the central government has set a20GW solar target by 2020 under thenational solar mission.

We, at General Catalyst Partners,anticipated this need in 2007 andstarted Sunborne Energy to buildworld-class solar power plants inIndia. To make this venture work ef-fectively, we teamed up with princi-pal scientists from University ofSouthern Florida who had state-of-the-art technological leadership andsenior business executives in India

The Need of the Hour Entrepreneurship inClean Energy

who brought in the best local opera-tional expertise. This combination al-lows us to leverage on the besttechnologies from the west and com-mercialize those in India. What wehave learnt is that indigenization oftechnologies is important and India is agreat place for this. A lower cost sup-ply chain gives anywhere between aquarter and a third lower costs just offthe bat. The final ingredient to successis a strong involvement in policy at thestate and federal levels. Just like the ITrevolution gave rise to Indian MNCfirms like Infosys, Wipro and TCS, wehope the new initiatives in solar energywill create global leaders in India.

The unique thing about clean en-ergy is that businesses of differentscales can be created. Localized mi-crogrids can be built with a few croresof rupees whereas a 100 MW solarplant can cost a few thousand crores.We see many startups in India that aimto work on varied problems like LEDlighting solutions, solar lanterns, solarPV manufacturers, waste-to-energypower producers, smart grid deploy-ment, distributed generation and recy-cled organics, etc. We also see hugeopportunities to build capital lightstartups in energy efficiency servicesand microgrids management. Energylosses in India are among the highestin the world and large parts of India arestill not grid connected. Water is an-other interesting space that could pro-vide a windfall to entrepreneurs ifplayed well at the right time.

Great teams create great compa-nies. Being trained in entrepreneurshipin the U.S. gives one an inherent ad-vantage. But it is imperative to com-plement this with knowledge transfer,localization of manufacturing and mostimportantly, an extremely strong localoperational expertise to build a win-ning team.

The author is a Managing Director at General Catalyst

VC TALK By Hemant Taneja

Hemant Taneja

Netmagic Solutions, a ManagedIT Hosting Service provider,has raised close to $16 million

in Series C financial round lead byNokia Growth Partners and CiscoSystems. Fidelity International andNexus Venture Partners who investedin the company’s second round offunding in 2008 also took part in thisround. The company will utilize thisinvestment to enhance its presence inthe data center market in India byopening new centers and expandingthe existing ones. The funds will alsobe used to increase investments in de-veloping cloud computing technolo-gies.

“We are delighted to have raisedfresh capital from Nokia Growth Part-ners and Cisco, and their industry ex-

pertise and global experience will helpas we continue our growth in managedhosting and cloud computing. Theirinvestment reinforces our industry andtechnological leadership and the po-tential for this market in India. We willutilize this round of funding to in-crease our datacenter footprint and in-crease investment in R&D efforts forour Cloud Computing platform,” saidSharad Sanghi, Managing Directorand CEO, Netmagic Solutions.

Upal Basu from Nokia GrowthPartners said the venture firm is on alookout for leading technology com-panies with significant potential forfuture growth and industry leader-ship. Netmagic has this potential andhence the investment. Netmagic tilldate has raised about $17.6 million,

which includes about $4 million fromtheir first round in 2000 and $13.5million in 2008.

Netmagic raises $16 Million in Series C Funding

Compiled by ST Team

Sharad Sanghi


COVER STORY

GLOPORE IMSStrengthening

the Global IMS Footprint

AQUENT, a leading mar-keting and creativestaffing agency, pro-vides design and con-tent management,

publishing and other creative servicesto its global client base from its off-shore studios located in India. Part ofits client acquisition process revolvesaround demonstration of its IT Infra-structure capabilities in terms of highavailability, network performance, se-curity and business continuity. Agrowing client base and increasing de-mands meant that the company builda further resilient IT Infrastructure thatcould be managed round the clock

through out the year and could bescaled with ease as the per growingbusiness needs and a decision to buildanother studio in Bangalore was made.

But due to limited in-house ex-pertise in infrastructure developmentand management, the company de-cided to selectively source the entireplanning, design and deployment ofthe IT Infrastructure. Since ‘time tomarket’ was a critical factor along withkey features like disaster managementand recovery program, network secu-rity and data backup, the challengewas to find an IMS partner that wouldbridge the gap quickly by leveragingits ITSM capabilities and map the

company’s growing IT Infrastructureneeds to the generic publishing indus-try. Despite a large number of IMSvendors in the market today, it choseGLOPORE IMS as its ITSM partner.

Conducting a quick but detailedrequirement analysis through exten-sive discussion with the company’smanagement team, GLOPORE IMSadvised them on how they couldmaximize their ROI through the dif-ferent options available. Once themanagement zeroed in on the appro-priate option, GLOPORE IMSquickly and effectively deployed itand set up the infrastructure in thenew studio in no time.

Incubated from IIMB-NSRCEL in2006, GLOPORE IMS is a Bangalorebased fast growing globally focused ITService and Infrastructure Manage-ment Services Company (ITSM/IMS)Company. With offices in Boston(U.S.) and UK, the company offersmanaged infrastructure services to

medium and large companies world-wide with the help of a wide networkof strategic partners. GLOPORE IMSaims to be among the leading IndianIMS company to set the benchmarkingstandards for IT Service Managementindustry. GLOPORE IMS is alreadyrecognized by many venture capital-

By Vimali Swamy

The global IMS market is currently estimatedto be $126 billion and NASSCOM report showthat revenue from IMS will triple from its current levels due to adoption of RIM, CloudComputing and Shared Services.

GLOPORE IMS At A GlanceFounded: 2006CEO:Satish KumarHeadquarters: BangaloreOther Offices: Boston (U.S.), UKEmployees: Over 350Customers: Over 80Website: www.gloporeims.com

Sitting (left to right): Vivek N. Joseph, Sunil P Rao, PS Ravindranath, Satish Kumar, Ashwini SKumar and Ananth KrishnaStanding (left to right): Pradeep Parameswaran, Sumithra Sen and Sunil Dutt

global clients, GLOPORE IMS beganits business by offering services in thedomestic market. “From the begin-ning we knew that IMS was a marketthat would grow not only globally butalso in India. We saw very early thatas companies across industries beginmoving towards complete computer-ization; India itself would become amajor consumer of these IT Infra-structure Management Services. Thusinstead of exploring export opportu-nities, we decided to first focus onIndia market and then go global,”says Dr. Rangan. Perhaps one of thefew companies who early on saw thebig domestic opportunity, GLOPOREIMS’s strategy worked in their favor.It provided GLOPORE IMS with theplatform to quickly ramp up and ma-ture its mix of ITSM service offeringsand achieve the growth it has accom-plished today.

One of its success stories in Indiais with Educomp Solutions, a glob-ally diversified education solutionsprovider and country’s largest edu-cation company. Winning a toughcompetition against several well es-tablished Tier 1, 2 and 3 companiesoffering IMS, GLOPORE IMSstarted its journey with EducompSolutions as its partner in SouthIndia covering all the four states(Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Keralaand Tamil Nadu). And within justthree months, it replaced Educomp’sother IMS partner that had been inthe market for 20 years, to becomeits partner in Central India as well.“We accomplished this purely be-cause of the team strength, our ITSMcapabilities and the know how in theIMS space,” beams Kumar. TodayEducomp Solutions is one of GLO-PORE IMS’s large customers andthe deal size itself is almost as big asany international mid-size IMS dealone can have, highlighting the wellthought strategy of using India aslab, a maturity ladder and to build itscost leadership.

The other part of the strategy is theconscious decision to remain a pureplay company. Today, in most IT serv-ices companies, IMS, though large, isone of the many services they offer for

their clients. This makes the ability towork with partners very limited as atsome point the partners in IMS tend tobecome competitors in another servicearea, creating hard-to-manage compe-tition-co-operation tension. IMS is anoffering that is replicated across differ-ent businesses by various vendors. Bybeing a pure play IMS company, GLO-PORE IMS focused on creating a de-livery engine and extending it to theecosystem. “By ecosystem we meanthat if one of our customers is con-sumer of other services like ADM orBPO from another well establishedfirm, then we could extend our IMS ca-pability to them as well, leveraging onthe existing relationship we have withour customer and boost the ecosys-tem,” explains Kumar. The companytoday has forged strong relationshipswith some of the top vendors of soft-ware, hardware, SIs and other businessapplications in different geographies

and partnered with them as a pure playfocus partner, where there is no tradeoff to be made and they can comple-ment their partners’ services to go tothe market and scale up and grow.

The final step to the strategy was toexpand its geographic presencethrough strategic partners. Every com-pany has a need for a wide range ofservices and, most of the times, a singlefirm may not be able to provide all ofit. This is how system integrators work;they bring together the vendors andproviders of the services from multipleareas to meet the customer’s require-ment. GLOPORE IMS realized the po-tential in a similar setup for IMS too.“Since, most of our customers wouldrequire other services apart from IMS,we decided to look for partners whocould support us in providing end toend service. This would be mutuallybeneficial for all three — the customer,the partner and us,” explains Kumar.

In the initial years, after havingbuilt its capability that is today bothmature and capable, the company sincelast year has been focusing on findingpartners across different geographies,


ists as the best startup (in services sec-tor), at Startup City SiliconIndia eventin 2009 & 2010!

Betting on the billion dollar marketInfrastructure management is a crit-ical function where even minutes ofdowntime can cripple a client’s busi-ness. Still, due to the high level ofexpertise, time and cost involved,companies are ready to outsourcethis to independent vendors to man-age it for them. The global IMS mar-ket is currently estimated to be $126billion, presenting a huge opportu-nity. It is no surprise that every one,from traditional IT services players,both big and small, to startups inIndia are trying to grab a piece ofthis multi-billion dollar pie which iscurrently dominated by the likes ofIBM, EDS and CSC. A recentNASSCOM report shows that rev-enue from IMS will triple from itscurrent levels as a result of the steepgrowth seen in RIM, Cloud Comput-ing and Shared Services.

But Satish Kumar, Founder, Chair-man and CEO of GLOPORE IMS hadenvisioned the growth opportunity inIMS way back in 2005 when he wasworking for a multinational company,HQ in U.S. After deep discussionswith several industry experts, he re-turned to India for good to foundGLOPORE IMS in 2006 along withAshwini SKumar and Dr. SrinivasaRangan, Co-Founders and Directors.

As a pure play IMS provider,GLOPORE IMS helps companies in-tegrate their business & IT strategywith IT Operations through uniquemix of IT Service Management serv-ices offerings including ITSM Trans-formation – Assessment, GapAnalysis, Roadmap, ImplementationConsulting & Training Services, Man-aged IT Services, IT InfrastructureManagement Services and Remote ITInfrastructure Management Services.

But unlike a traditional IT servicesprovider that works as an arms-length

service provider, GLOPORE IMS be-lieves in being more than just anotherIMS provider. “We prefer to be themini McKinsey & Company of IMSIndustry,” says Kumar, referring to theconsultant – client relationship itshares with its customers. By engag-ing with the CXOs right from the re-quirement tracking stage andunderstanding the client’s end to endcurrent business status, end goals andbest approach to achieve them. GLO-PORE IMS helps customers to focuson their core business and achievetheir business objectives through ITService Management Excellence.Using a selective sourcing model, itenables companies to retain controlover strategic IT functions while theyselectively source multi-year ManagedIT Services from GLOPORE IMSthrough well defined Service LevelAgreements (SLA) in alignment withtheir business objectives. “While wehelp our customers to improve thequality of IT Services, we help themtransform their capital expenditures to

operational expenditures, predict andreduce total cost of ownership (TCO)for IT Service Management on an on-going basis. We help them achievefaster growth by increasing their pro-ductivity,” adds Kumar. This approachhas been a key reason behind the com-pany’s ability to clinch large deals.Today 350 plus people strong with 80plus customers and many more in thepipeline, GLOPORE IMS, amidst sev-eral large players, is stealthily firmingits foothold in the global IMS scenariowith a three prong strategy.

The Three Step Business ModelInstead of following the rat race andblindly entering the buzzing IMSmarket and trying to succeed with atrial and error method, Kumar andteam had a well thought strategy be-fore starting company — be a pureplay IMS company focusing on In-dian market through customer centricalliances.

Unlike most services companiesthat started with and continue to serve

With companies across industries moving towards complete computerization, India itselfis becoming a major consumer of IT infrastructure services.

"The presentations put forward by GLOPORE in helping us choose the right op�tions was very impressive. The multiple solutions proposed by them reflectedtheir strong understanding of our business as well as their ability to establish aflexible IT Infrastructure that could be scaled as per our growing needs. "Jayaraj, Director of Operations, AQUENT Solutions

"GLOPORE IMS has done a fantastic job for us. We engaged them as a consult�ant to identify areas of improvement in our hosting business. They identified thebusiness problems very quickly and brought in great value in collaborating with usto establish a road map for improving the processes. GLOPORE team membersare very well qualified not just in terms of domain knowledge but also the busi�ness acumen. They went an extra mile to ensure that we as a business partnerare extremely satisfied with the service. We now engage them with many otherinitiatives."Raj Mruthyunjayappa, MD � APAC & Europe,Talisma Corporation

“Though the association with GLOPORE IMS has been very short and limited togetting trained in ITIL Foundation, the experience during this brief stint was verygood. We look forward to taking this relationship forward to other areas as well.”Anand Nair, Chief Manager – IT Services, Manappuram Group of Companies

What Do Clients Have To Say About GLOPORE IMS?

GLOPORIANS @ Work


developing customer centric alliances.With a strong partner ecosystem inAfrica, GLOPORE IMS successfullytook on the opportunity with one of thelargest telecom operators in the worldand be their delivery partners in 19countries across the continent. “We arehelping our partner with their onsiteIMS strategy, pre-sales, transition man-agement, building resources, skills,tools & automation maturity and webecome their remote delivery enginefor entire Africa,” says Kumar. Simi-larly, just last month it forged a part-nership in Sri Lanka and Maldives witha company that has been there for thepast three decades. The partner com-pany has most of the leading compa-nies across verticals like airlines andbanks in that region as its clients.“With our partner in Sri Lanka, we willextend our RIM and IMS offerings toits clients. In Middle East too we areforging a partnership with an estab-lished company to take our IMS andRIM services through them acrossMiddle East. In India we have a strongpartner in Chennai-based SundaramInfotech, through which we are tryingto make in roads into the BFSI and theautomotive sector. The times are in-deed exciting!” says Kumar. Presenceacross geographies through strong al-liances with local partners is the reasonwhy GLOPORE IMS is able to have anedge over other IMS vendors.

Creating a Value Chain GLOPORE IMS today has positioneditself in services market with a mix ofITSM service offerings that help com-panies benefit from better integrationof Business and IT strategies with theirorganization’s operations along with astrong value chain in terms of businessmodel, services and execution. A com-bination of this has been instrumentalin company’s rocketing growth overthe last few years.

Despite all the above factors,Kumar understands that the foundationand the real strength of the company lie

in its management and associates. Theunderlying culture at GLOPORE IMSis ‘entrepreneurial’ and Kumar ensuresthat it does not get diluted as the com-pany continues to grow. From a teamof 18 people, in 2006, GLOPORE IMStoday is 350 plus member strong andhopes to grow tenfold to 3500 by endof next financial year. With a strongmentorship from project & COE heads,the company sees to it that every pro-fessional at the company is givenample challenging opportunities andglobal exposure to develop their capa-bility and expertise to the full. All as-

sociates are encouraged to beentrepreneurial in thought and action.

“GLOPORE IMS is a team ofmembers who are part of a professionalfamily, eager to learn and grow to-gether. We refer our associates as‘GLOPORIANS’ and not as employ-ees and by working together actively,we seek to identify and bring out thehidden capabilities in GLOPORIANSto match our promised service deliv-ery,” says Ashwini SKumar, Co-Founder, Director and AVP - HR,Finance & Accounting , GLOPOREIMS, “Associates are allowed to makedecisions and get a chance to learnfrom their mistakes and contribute to abetter working environment, inner sat-isfaction and excellence through theirlearning and growth within GLOPOREIMS family.”

Since, the management plays acritical role in shaping the company;Kumar handpicks the people to joinleadership roles. “At the end of theday, every associate at GLOPOREIMS should be an ambassador of thevalue that the company stands for,”says Kumar.

The road aheadSince its founding, GLOPORE IMShas been enjoying a healthy streakof growth but now with the expand-ing global foot-print, the companyhopes to grow by 3-4 times year-on-year and, in few years’ time, hopesto either go public or forge biggeralliances with a strategic investmentpartner. “By 2011-12 we hope to bethe chosen IT Service Managementpartner for 250 global customersand be among the top 10 global IMScompanies by 2015,” envisionsKumar.

At the same time, GLOPOREIMS strongly believes in building ahealthy ecosystem. At the rate atwhich the IMS space has grown inthe last three years, it is critical thatthere is a pool of skilled resourcesavailable in the years ahead, not onlyfor the company itself but for otherplayers in the space as well. Toachieve this, GLOPORE IMS hasbeen working with several tier 2 & 3degree colleges to empower youngand dynamic graduates through its“IMS Gurukul” programs to trans-form them into professional IMS ex-perts and create employmentopportunities for them.

At $126 billion the opportunitiesin IMS space is ample and enough forevery player. With GLOPORE IMSgrowing by leaps and bounds both interms of customer and partners, its vi-sion of being one of the Top 10 IMSCompany does not seem too ambi-tious. “Despite all the competitionand hunger for growth, the ultimateidea for GLOPORE IMS is to be ableto co-exist amongst other large globalIMS vendors!” says Kumar.

By being a pure play IMS company, GLOPOREIMS is focused on creating a delivery engineand extending it to the ecosystem.

Indian IT companies have realizedthat infrastructure managementservices (IMS) as the next big op-portunity for business. India saw atremendous growth in the infra-

structure management space both in pri-vate and public sectors. The government,both the centre and state, is launchingmany projects that needs IT infrastruc-ture management at various levels.Cloud computing and virtualizationcreated large areas of opportunitiesfor infrastructure management inIndia. As the demand for infrastruc-ture outsourcing is also coming fromthe medium-sized firms globally apartfrom the large ones, the size of businessopportunities widens further for the In-dian players to grab a good bite of thelargely untapped market.

On the path to recovery, manymedium and large companies are in-creasing their outsourcing projects toreduce the cost and to focus on theircore areas. This makes the infra-structure management services in-dustry to grow in an unprecedentedway, which opens a large spectrum ofbusiness opportunities to the leading off-shore locations like India. The Indianvendors account for a market size of $1.4billion growing at a CAGR of 44 percent,reveals a Zinnov study on infrastructuremanagement services. The current globalmarket size of IMS is estimated to be$370 billion and is expected to grow at aCAGR of 4 percent over the next fouryears. It also states that the current IMSspend is expected to be around 12 per-cent to 20 percent of the total IT budgetof the companies, which will certainlyrise in the coming years. Almost 40 per-cent of the global IMS market is out-sourced, which is around $150 billion.

Fast adoption of virtualization, cloudcomputing and automation by Indianfirms gets them an edge over their com-petitors to pocket major IMS projects.The enormous amount of investments inIT infrastructure and the present IT envi-ronment makes India a top contender forlarge IMS projects across the globe. The

a v a i l -

ability oflarge number of skilled

professionals gives an upper hand forIndia to be preferred as the best offshoredestination for infrastructure manage-ment.

Globally EDS, T-Systems, IBM andHewlett-Packard are considered to be thetop vendors of infrastructure manage-ment services while many Indian com-panies like Wipro, HCL, Microland, TCSand Infosys are also the prominent play-ers in the IMS market.

Banking Financial Services Insur-ance (BFSI) is the major contributor tothe IMS industry in India. Nearly 43 per-cent of the $1.4 billion IMS marketcomes from BFSI in India. Many multi-national banking giants such as RBS,

HSBC and Standard Chartered havestarted their operations in India to man-age their IM services. Telecom servicesare the second largest contributor to theinfrastructure management services inIndia.

The Indian IT industry have alreadyidentified business services managementsolutions, threat management solutions,

applications management solutions,systems management solutions andnetwork management solutions asthe emerging infrastructure man-agement solutions which they

should be focusing on. The smartplayers have started to focus their in-

frastructure management with a busi-ness services aspect rather than a purelytechnology-centric view.

Remote infrastructure manage-ment (RIM), which is the way of re-mote monitoring and managing theinfrastructure components of anorganization, has got much mo-mentum of late. India has been asignificant beneficiary of this shift.

The challenge is to manage diversetechnology infrastructure and managemultiple vendors. Concerns over securityand data privacy also need to be ad-dressed.

According to a Nasscom report, upto 75 percent of all infrastructure man-agement roles could be outsourced glob-ally, which would create a $26 billion to$28 billion revenue potential by 2013. Italso states that the Indian companiescould capture approximately 50 percentof this revenue. With remote infrastruc-ture management gaining ground and in-creasing cost-saving efforts byoutsourcing, infrastructure managementservice seems to be the next big businessboom for the Indian IT industry.


India to Grab the InfrastructureManagement Services Market

FEATURE

Name Founded CEO Descrip on

Appnomic SystemsBangalore appnomic.com

2006 DD.. PPaaddmmaannaabbhhaann

Offers highly automated technology, intelligent analysis and processmethods to large and mid-size companies. With a unique deliverymodel, it enables companies to be more efficient and enhance pro-duc-vity by over thirty percent.

Ctrl S Bangalore ctrls.in

2007 PP.. SSrriiddhhaarr RReeddddyyA Cer-fied Tier IV datacenter which specializing in custom-built IT In-frastructure and Services, Co-loca-on Services, Managed Services,and Disaster Recovery & Business Con-nuity Planning Services.

Futuresoft SolutionsNew Delhi futuresoftsolutions.com

1988 VViippuull DDuuttttaaSpecializes in all areas of IT, ranging from Managed Services, StrategicOutsourcing, Business Solu-ons, Cloud Compu-ng, InfrastructureSet up & Op-miza-on and Product Retail.

Glodyne TechnoserveMumbaiglodynetechnoserve.in

1997 AAnnnnaanndd SSaarrnnaaaaiikk Provides technology led business solu-ons across two SBU’s; Tech-nology Infrastructure Management Services (Technology IMS) andApplica-on So�ware Services

Glopore IMSBangalore gloporeims.com

2006 SSaattiisshh KKuummaarr

Offers niche ITSM \ ITIL \ COBIT best prac-ces based Consul-ng,Training and Managed IT Services. A pure play IMS company it catersto maedium and large players in ver-cals including Telecom, Bank-ing, Insurance, ITES-BPO, Hospitality, Retail, Financial Services,Healthcare, Educa-on, and Manufacturing.

Infinite Computer SolutionsBangalore infinite.com

1999 UUppiinnddeerr ZZuuttsshhiiA provider of IMS, Intellectual Property (IP) Leveraged Solu-ons andApplica-on Management Services with focus on Telecom, Media,Manufacturing, Energy & U-li-es & Healthcare industries.

inTarvo TechnologiesNoidaintarvo.com

1995 PPrraavviinn JJaaiinnA provider of Integrated Lifecycle Management (ILM) support serv-ices for Technology Products for Original Equipment Manufacturers,EMS Companies, Distributors, Large Corpora-on and Retail Chains.

Maintec TechnologiesBangalore maintec.com

1998 CC..SS.. GGuuppttaa

An IT Solu-ons provider whose core focus is to provide Remote In-frastructure Management (RIM), Remote Data Center Managementand Applica-on Development / Maintenance services on IBM Main-frame Pla,orms.

Netmagic SolutionsMumbainetmagicsolutions.com

1998 SShhaarraadd SSaanngghhii

A IT Hos-ng Service Provider, specializing in Internet Data Center &Managed Hos-ng, Infrastructure Management, Managed Security,Cloud Compu-ng, Applica-on Hos-ng, Messaging & Collabora-on,Disaster Recovery & Availability and Professional Services.

Silver Touch TechnologiesAhmedabadsilvertouch.com

1992 VViippuull TThhaakkkkaarrA provider of provide IT Infrastructure Solu-ons, System Integra-on,Network/Server Management services across India

By Binu Paul


AppnomicAutomated InfrastructureManagement

In an online business, profit liesin great user experience andperformance of the online app.When millions of peopleflocked to one of India’s lead-

ing travel portal for their online travelbooking, the company realized thedifficulties in monitoring and manag-ing the performance levels of the ap-plications, which comprise of theirfive business critical online bookingapplications having about 26 types oftransactions. The biggest challengewas to get real-time information onthe performance of the critical rev-enue producing transactions. Addedon to it was the dearth of internal re-sources who could monitor it n real-time. The company talked NVPfunded Appnomic who specialize inautomating application and infra-structure performance management.

Witnessing the intricacy of travelportal’s applications, the Appnomicteam configured its AIPM tool tomonitor and analyze the performancein a non-invasive model, whereby theonline portal’s management & opera-tions teams were empowered with ac-cess to real-time transactionperformance dashboard views. “Weintegrate our tools in our service de-livery to automate 60 percent of IToperations, and also reduce the timespent on fault isolation by 25 percentfor performance issues on critical ITapplications,” says D Padmanabhan

(Paddy), the MD and CEO of App-nomic.

The growing separation of physi-cal and logical layers in IT infra-structure is bringing to the forefrontautomation of IT operations, inte-grated performance monitoring andremote based delivery services. Thisapproach of remote service deliverycoupled with automation not onlyprovides increased cost reduction butalso reduced cycle times or errors andless dependence on people resourcesfor routine IT operations tasks.

The Appnomic Service Automa-tion Platform (ASAP) with its processflow management which includes runbook automation, SOP documentmanagement and action execution onthird party systems can automate allroutine IT operations functions for anenterprise. Its reporting module pro-vides both high level SLA reports anddetailed task level reports to measureefficiency.

The past three years economic en-vironment in the western market hasdiscouraged investment and adoptionof new technologies by enterprises.However, now with the emergenceand adoption of cloud infrastructureand willingness of companies toadopt innovative IT management ap-proach has gradually increased theirspending in the sector. With thechange in the attitude, Appnomic,with its unique proposition of au-

tomation based Infrastructure Man-agement is poised to gain substantialrevenue increase. The company hasan innovations group, as opposed to atypical software development team,and practices new methods across allfunctions of the company whether itsdelivering patentable technology orservice delivery using new processesto serve the dynamic customer needs.

While the concept of “Simplify-ing and Automating IT Manage-ments” sounds exciting andlucrative, delivery and managementof such a promise needs depthacross the three dimensions ofprocess, people and technology.Appnomic has invested and contin-ues to build on these facets and thathas helped them in gaining promi-nent client s like, Cypress, Ramco,Everest Bank, Yatra and Rediff. “Wehave helped our clients identifyareas of concern, optimize andtransform their end to end IT infra-structure. We have reduced theircost of IT operations while addingsignificant value to the quality ofservice delivery to their internal &external customers,” maintains theCEO. Today, after four years ofbeing in the industry the companyenvisions expanding its technologi-cal capabilities and service deliveryto cover more geographies and alsoattain a better position for managingcloud based IT infrastructure.

D Padmanabhan Infrastructure management is acritical function where even min-utes of downtime can cripple aclient’s business and this makesmost global companies unwilling

to hand over control of their networksto offshore companies. Infinite Com-puter Solutions, founded by SanjayGovil in 1999, with its onshore and off-shore business model, is fully preparedto seize this opportunity. The companywhich started with AMS as its offeringis now focusing more on IMS business,trying to make the most of the massive$126 billion global IMS market, cur-rently dominated by the likes of IBM,EDS and CSC. A recent Nasscom reportshows that revenue from IMS will triplefrom its current levels as a result of thesteep growth seen in RIM, Cloud Com-puting and Shared Services.

“By 2014, we hope to achieve onethird of the company’s revenue throughIMS services.” says Upinder Zutshi,Managing Director, Infinite, who seesthe company’s IMS services gaining asteady momentum. The IMS offeringsin the company revolve around its ex-pertise in remote infrastructure and net-work management, enhancing datacenter and IT security services, produc-tion support and End User ComputingServices. Its focus is towards buildingcapabilities that enable it to offer end-to-end IMS as a Managed Service Of-fering and this has led it to makeinvestments to build capabilities; bothin Infrastructure and in people.

The Build Operate Transfer(BOT)/BOM model that the company

uses helps its customers to leverage onits infrastructure, technology, peopleand process to save huge investments.This model works very efficiently, es-pecially for its customers, as they canfocus on their business functions andleave the technology to Infinite. Further,the company’s approach has been topartner with customers to ensure theirsuccess with accountability for their IT.This approach helped in developing In-finite’s capabilities in the IMS space.

The major competition in the IMSspace comes from large MNE’s whichhave mostly adopted the approach oftaking over the customer’s IT assets.Small and medium Indian firms cannotadopt this approach asthey lack the size and ca-pabilities required for it,so Indian companiesfocus on providing re-mote support. Infinite,with its expertise andinfrastructure thatenables provisionof managed serv-ices, has builtcompetency tocompete in thisspace. The com-pany differenti-ates well withnot just the capa-bility, but under-standing ofcustomer strat-egy or vision

In theIMS space

the company has faced three major chal-lenges; foremost being the limited ex-pertise in the Indian market, thefinancial slowdown across the U.S. andthe Europe, and its focus towards build-ing a capability to offer managed IMSservices and the early decision it took toinvest in capabilities that would enableit to manage client infrastructure end-to-end. The company has managed to suc-cessfully address all these challengesover time. This has been done by suc-cessfully retaining and up-skilling ex-isting talent to overcome the limitedexpertise available in Indian market. Byproviding clients with IT services thathelped them to have substantial savingson their IT, the company assured itsclients who were nervous about an un-certain future. Infinite’s early decisionto invest in capabilities that enabled it tomanage client infrastructure has paid

off, providing it with experience inthis space to effectively com-pete with its global counter-parts.

Infinite believes in acollaborative approachwith customers, partners,shareholders and em-ployees. Its currentfocus is on further de-velopment of its IMSservices offering as aOne Stop Solution,strengthening relation-ships with customersand partners and makingthem the first choice for

customers in IMS space.

InfiniteConcentrating More on IMS

Upinder Zutshi

By ST Team

By Hari Anil


Companies which used tokeep IMS services in-house due to data sensi-tivity issues are nowincreasingly outsourcing

their IMS activities to reduce cost andfocus on their core areas. About 40percent of companies are now out-sourcing their IMS services and agrowing interest of the same is nowseen in Indian companies too. Be-cause of the availability of highlyskilled labour, India has gainedground across the world in IT soft-ware side; the next logical movementcould be in IT hardware and IMSspace. With digital convergence andmulti-brand scenario more and moreof IMS activities will be outsourced tothird Party Service Partner’s wherethe vendors who have skill set for allthe above fields will be clear a win-ner.

inTarvo Technologies, founded in1995, with offices in all the major In-dian cities and service centers in morethan 200 cities, is one of India’slargest service provider of IntegratedLifecycle Management (ILM) fortechnology products. It leverages onits relationships with the fortune 500companies in IT, CE, Electronic Se-curity and Telecommunications fieldsto ensure seamless IMS services to itscustomers. According to the companyits ILM expertise can act as a differ-entiating factor for them in the IMSspace. The company promises to takecare of the customer requirementsend-to-end so that their IMS customergets seamless service beyond IMSinto a complete lifecycle support. Thisgoes from supporting diverse elec-tronic devices for onsite as well asbackend support, integrating solutionsin IT, CE, electronic security and

telecommunication into complex so-lutions like BMS (Building Manage-ment Systems) which integrate theseon single platform. And with presenceacross multiple cities means the com-pany is also uniquely positioned tosupport large multi-city facilities.

When it comes to competition thecompany again considers this countrywide network as its advantage. Ac-cording to inTarvo most of the IMScompanies across the country are at aregional level or at best with supportoffices in only the main cities and as ithas a country wide office networkwhich comprises of more than 400 of-fices it enjoys a unique position. Byfocusing on quality processes, peopleand continuous skills enhancementthe company has managed to retainmost of its vendors for the past 15years.

Like most of the companies in theIT space one of the main challengesthat inTarvo faced was the challengeof retaining skilled manpower. Thecompany considers itself to be a cra-dle for skilled technical manpower in

IT, CE, Electronic security and Tele-com industries. It has started traininginstitutes under the brand name ofiStep. “People continue to be the keyelement of inTarvo’s success; em-ployee retention is thus our focus.Host of programs are organized toboost the employee morale like anannual festival Aagaman and Littlechamp. With unique recruitmentprocess of ‘Ek ka Dus’, an internalreferences program, we have also in-creased the employee retention.” saysSudheer Puthhiran K, President,Field Services, inTarvo.

After recent slowdown in the ITspending, especially in the corporatesegment, the company has plans toenter into value added services. Inthe coming financial year inTarvoplans to pursue the automation busi-ness, e-waste management, globalrepair centre, installation and repairof high-end switches, medical elec-tronics, networking and storage sys-tems. The company also plans toreach more than 1000 cities in thenext 18 months.

inTarvoBringing Complete LifecycleSupport to IMS Space

Sudheer Puthhiran K

In 1998, outsourcing was re-stricted to Y2K remediation andOff-shoring was still in its nas-cent stage with body-shoppingbeing more prevalent. Compa-

nies had not yet gained the confidenceto outsource critical Infrastructure Man-agement Services (IMS) and mostlykept it in-house or outsourced it to near-shore sites. Amidst this insignificantscene C. S. (Sonny) Gupta witnessed abright IMS future and thus foundedMaintec Technologies. The companybegan servicing clients with a focus onproviding IBM Training and Y2K re-mediation services on Mainframe plat-forms. Over a period of time, Maintechas emerged as an offshore outsourcingdestination. Twelve years after foundingMaintec, today Sonny modestly smilesat his own accurate vision, when he seesmore number of critical processes beingoffshored from across the globe.

In his bestseller “The World is Flat”Thomas L Friedman has explained howstaff functions outsourced to India willtransform all forms of Americanbusinesses. Maintec took theclue and readily began to tight-ship its Remote IT Staffing divi-sion. “We thoroughly gauge thetechnical expertise that the as-signment needs and then takeinto account the client’s or-ganization’s culture andworking patterns beforewe propose suitable can-didates for projects.” saysthe CEO. Maintec under-stands that companies arepaying premium for

weekend and third shifts, which can besignificantly reduced. Maintec’s off-shore IT resources function on a24x7x365 basis ensuring clients com-plete coverage for their Software De-velopment & Maintenance and ITInfrastructure needs. Maintec’s Hire,Train and Deploy (HTD) program, aturnkey, no-obligation solution forclients, has to its credit of creating ex-tremely niche skills which are not read-ily available in the Indian market.“Bridging the gap of Project require-ments by enhancing skills has been thekey ingredient for success in the HTD”says Naveen.V, Managing Director ofMaintec Technologies, India whothough its 100 percent subsidiaryProED Training has had the distinctionof imparting training to over 600Batches, 12,000 skilled Data Develop-ers with 100 percent employment to itsalumni.

RIM as an industry can realize $26-28 billion in revenue by 2013, withIndia capturing as much as 50-55 per-

cent share of this. Maintec’s corefocus is to provide Remote Infra-structure Management (RIM), Re-mote Data Center

Management and ApplicationDevelopment & Mainte-

nance services on IBMMainframe andMidrange Platforms.Though the competi-tion is with biggieslike HCL, TCS, In-fosys, Wipro, Cog-nizant, Patni, TechMahindra, IBM, HP

and Accenture, Maintec has been ableto maintain its edge through the GlobalDelivery Center that consists of com-plete z/OS, AS/400 (iSeries) and AIXInfrastructure. They have in-house DataCenter in Bangalore with an ES/9000Mainframe staffed with a full fledgedand System Team. This platform hasbeen upgraded to the latest z SeriesMainframes. Maintec can provideclients with fully managed z/OS, z/VMand zLinux Environments with flexibledelivery models – Onsite at client’spremises or Remotely at Maintec DataCenter.

A huge opportunity lies ahead forMaintec in the RIM market which istouted to be the next big offshoreprospect for India after application de-velopment and maintenance (ADM)and BPO. Maintec has been aggres-sively creating awareness among CIO’sof fortune companies about the effectivebusiness values they get post the slow-down era, by developing strategic asso-ciations with a well-rooted offshore ITsolutions provider specialized in theRIM domain.

Internally at Maintec, each em-ployee is given an opportunity to be in-dependent with focus for on-goinglearning both at a personal and profes-sional level. The entrepreneurial spiritruns deep at all levels of the organiza-tion. The company’s goal for 2011 is ex-pansion of the RIM service offering toUK and European markets apart fromthe existing US geography.

Maintec TechnologiesIndia’s Emerging IMS Company

Naveen.V

Sonny Gupta

By Hari Anil

By ST Team


The Gourmet

IT Services Provider

Bala Chandra, CEO

Major League Baseball(MLB), the highestlevel of professionalbaseball in the USand Canada, has 30

clubs in the league. Every month thecentral commission brings out a finan-cial audit wherein the clubs need to re-port the revenue gained from all sourcesright from ticket sales to the sales of foodand beverages during the matches to thatfrom advertisements and media broad-casting.

Though there were several ERP andfinancial applications available in themarket from large software vendors,there was none that suited and under-stood the tasks required by MLB.The fi-nancial application had to be built fromthe scratch. Despite a myriad of large ITservices companies in the industry, todaythere are only few who provide customapplication development. MLB ap-

proached Vernalis Systems, a small ITservices company based in New York.Understanding the criticality of the proj-ect the company, in a very short time,built the solution. Today, post the suc-cessful application development work,MLB has become one of its major cus-tomers. The history of the company isfilled with a lot of such success stories.

Founded in 1999, Vernalis Systemsis a pure play IT services company, spe-cializing in critical custom applicationsdevelopment across the Web and mo-bile. Today, a decade since its humblebeginnings, the company has created astrong footprint as a gourmet IT servicesprovider along with additional servicelines of engineering and media. Theycount several large players across areaslike healthcare, energy, sports and enter-tainment, private equity, workspacetechnologies, marketing services, emer-gency preparedness response, travel,

banking, compliance, and manufactur-ing as their customers.

The Birth of the CompanyVernalis Systems was founded by indi-viduals with immense experience in var-ious aspects of IT by having worked insome of the major organizations aroundthe world. The team of professionalsleading the company is composed of ex-perts in their respective fields, having thebreadth and depth of experience thatspans across a wide technical spectrumand subject matter expertise.

From day one, the core philosophyof the company was to build sustainablesystems and not body shop like otherlarge IT players. While in the initialyears the company started as a consult-ing firm, it soon re-positioned it self as acritical IT services provider. From serv-icing a few large niche clients in NewYork and surrounding areas the com-

pany slowly broadened its customerbase and today it has a grip on severalkey markets including US, Europe, andIndia in the areas of Technology, Engi-neering, and Media.

The company in 2003 set up theirIndia operation, which serves as the de-velopment center. “From a customerpoint of view, we specialize in criticalapplications. Most of the applications wedevelop are not cookie cutter kind. Thereis a grave challenge when it comes tojust maintaining the resource and tech-nical competency as the developmentwork happens across different platformslike iPad, Android, and traditional Webapplication simultaneously,” explainsBala Chandra, CEO, Vernalis Systems.This is where the company’s specialtylies in. “We do not aspire to become alarge scale IT company but rather a spe-cialty gourmet provider,” he adds.

Small is BeautifulIn an age where every one is aiming atgrabbing a large market share and rak-ing in big ‘moola’ by stepping into everypossible area of IT services, VernalisSystems believes in standing apart by of-fering specialized critical custom appli-cation development.

In custom applications development,the challenge starts right from the re-quirement tracking stage. Since the re-quirements continue to evolve,developing an application around it islike ‘trying to shoot a moving target’.Since this kind of work requires in-depthtechnological expertise, one of thebiggest challenges for the company hasbeen getting the right people. “It is pre-cisely the reason we chose value and notvolume in terms of resources. We wantto be the SWAT team, where failure isnot an option,” says Chandra. Today, 11years since inception, Vernalis Systemsis 120 people strong and only aims toscale up to 300 in the coming years.

The Three Pillars of BusinessBut where it lacks in resource strength, itmakes up with the varied technology ex-

pertise it brings to the customers. Itsthree service areas are technology, engi-neering, and media. A technology neu-tral company, it broadly classifies the ITbusiness into three segments - traditionalsoftware development, mobile, and busi-ness intelligence. Since the spectrum oftraditional software is very wide, thecompany takes up projects only where apackaged solution does not fit a cus-tomer’s requirement. For example, thecompany is currently developing a bio-metric system for a client in DominicanRepublic. Since there is no pre-devel-oped or packaged software or prototypeavailable for their specific requirements,Vernalis Systems has a team deployedthat is working with the client and un-derstanding the project specs and re-quirements. Today, the InternationalPlayer Acquisition System (IPAS), abiometric system, is under developmentand soon would be ready for realtimeapplication.

Mobile is another area where thecompany has a strong foothold, as itconstitutes about 30 percent of the busi-ness. “We started mobile developmentback in the days of PALM and over theyears we have done numerous projectson Symbian and Blackberry and todayon iPhone and Android,” says Chandra.Now it has even moved over to devel-oping apps on iPad. Most of the projectsin this segment essentially involve de-veloping key features of certain enter-prise applications as an extension on anymobile platform.

Now with the iPhone and Androidslowly displacing Blackberry within en-

terprises, the company too has begun toexplore opportunities in this arena. Oneof the recent applications it has built oniPhone is ‘WeCab’, a cab sharing appli-cation for US markets that is currentlyproductized for New York. Quiet satis-fied with the product, the customer nowplans to extend it to other geographies aswell.

For Vernalis Systems, it is all aboutstaying in tune with the trends in the in-dustry. Within just a few months of thelaunch of iPad, the company is alreadygeared up with an interactive learningapplication for it. Chandra and teamhave developed an interactive activitybook, a story book with pictures, wherethe story line changes depending on theactivity chosen.

Business intelligence is the third partof the company’s business and consti-tutes about 20 percent of the revenue. Itsoon plans to launch its flagship BIproduct ‘BACPAC’, which will co-exist

with building access control systems andprovide tremendous value additions tothe organizations by leveraging the un-tapped data potential and providing busi-ness intelligence in helping theorganization in streamlining processeslike employee on-boarding and exiting,workspace utilization, emergency re-sponses, and more.

Engineering design is a separatethread of service line of Vernalis Sys-tems. Leveraging first class design facil-ities, equipments, and softwareknowledge this division has alreadymade a significant mark by providingmaximum design efficiency in the areas

“Software development is a humanjob and errors are inevitable. Beingopen in communication from the beginning helps forge a credible relationship with the customers andbridge the gaps”

COMPANY SPOTLIGHT By Vimali Swamy

Bala Chandra, CEO Vernalis Systems

of industrial machinery and automation.Vernalis Systems boasts of a team of de-sign engineers who are highly proficientin the latest engineering design andanalysis tools. This team provides designsolutions for their clients in Germany inthe automobile and manufacturing sec-tors in the areas of design adaptation, de-sign optimization, finite elementanalysis, and industrial animation forclients like Blohm-Jung, Stuertz, Georg,and more.

Media division of Vernalis Systemscompletes the triangle of their services.Ranging from designing and developingmarketing initiatives online, using richmedia technologies for compelling andinteractive brand experiences throughstoryboarding, scripting, and charactercreation, the company exploits digitalmedia for maximum gain.

Providing creative services to authorMarc Levy in France during his booklaunch and building rich interactive pro-motional Web presence, brand buildingand promotion for real estate giants inIndia, and a restaurant major in the USare a few to mention about their creativesolutions.

Customer is King and Employees areAssetsFor Chandra, it was a conscious decisionto keep the company a relatively smallenterprise offering niche services. But inan age of cut throat competition, whereits larger peers are striving hard to wincustomers on the basis of human re-source and other infrastructure capabili-ties, Vernalis Systems treads a differentpath. “For us, it is not the number of cus-tomers that matter but rather the lengthand depth of customer engagement. Atany given time we have 25 active proj-ects that vary anywhere between threemonths to 2 years,” says Chandra.

“Empathy” to customers is the un-derlying culture within the company.Unlike most vendors who act on the or-ders of the customers, at Vernalis Sys-tems, the idea is to involve with everyaspect of the project right from the be-

ginning. Instead of waiting for the cus-tomer to provide specifications, thecompany helps think them through therequirement. Since the company has alateral experience in different industries,it sits with the customer right from theearly requirement definition stage andhelps them think through the process.Because of the strong technology back-ground the company brings to the table,it is also able to suggest the right toolsthe customer can look at deploying inorder to lessen the cost and make theprocess simpler. “The involvement inclient’s business is so deep that by thetime the project is completed, they treatus like consultants rather than just de-velopers. This is the big differentiator,”believes Chandra.

It is this, in combination with hon-esty and transparency, that has workedwonders for Vernalis Systems. Everycustomer is made aware of the fact thatall the development work is being donein its development center in Chennai.Apart from the 110 engineers at Chen-nai, the company has six project man-agers in its US office and two in Londonand Germany. These managers act asboth the cultural and business interfacesof the company, thereby providing alevel of comfort to the customers. Whiledesign and architecture are done fromChennai, the managers onsite focus onbusiness analysis and project manage-ment.

In order to keep the communicationclear between the company and its cus-tomers, the company has developed aninternal Web based project managementtool - COLLABRIA. Since every projectis a custom application development, therequirements keep pouring in time totime, and hence everything about a proj-

ect is documented with in COL-LABRIA. Since everyone from cus-tomers, project managers, developers,and technical architects have access toit, one can monitor the progress at anygiven time, thus cutting down the com-munication and response time betweenthe company and the customer. “Soft-ware development is a human job anderrors are inevitable. Thus we believe tobe open in our communication from thebeginning thereby forging a credible re-lationship with the customers. Collabriahelps bridging the gap,” says Chandra.

The relationship that the companyhas forged with its customers is so deepthat today most of the new projects comeonly via customer reference. A testimo-nial to this is reflected in their significant

client retention rate and the fact that theyhave started or are in process of startingjoint ventures with several of their cus-tomers. Not only have their customersprovided several credible leads that re-sult in tangible projects, but VernalisSystems has also started technology cen-tric joint ventures with their customers.These joint ventures span various verti-cals including healthcare services, phar-maceutical, and social networking. Mostrecently, they deployed a mobile appli-cation: Connect5 with one of their long-standing customers. Connect5 is a socialnetworking application that rivalsfoursquare. Connect5 is a location-basediPhone application that shows you whata venue is like and how your friends aredoing in realtime.

In order to further enhance cus-tomers’ trust in the company, it con-stantly conducts audits to ensure thestandards are met. Clients are also in-vited to the company’s premises annu-ally in order to get a first hand

experience in the company’s work cul-ture and ethics.

While customers are the utmost pri-ority for the company, it is not unobser-vant to the employees who are the realassets. Even though the team is sepa-rated geographically, the working cul-ture melts the time zones and distances,giving the global clients an experienceof working with one team.

Every professional in Vernalis Sys-tems is groomed to be proficient in mul-tiple technologies, handling variousdevelopment methodologies, conversantin working with global clients from di-versified domains. With an appropriatementoring program in place, the man-agement strives hard to groom the nextgeneration of leaders within the organi-zation and inculcate in them the values itstands for. Because of the nature of theprojects and the challenges the teamsface, the company believes that its pro-fessionals are much more experiencedand industry savvy in comparison withcurrent industry standards.

“Our open and transparent way ofworking means all our employees di-rectly see and experience that their suc-cess, their team’s success, the client’ssuccess and the organization’s successare directly linked with each other;which greatly fosters an exceptionallevel of personal motivation and inspi-ration, which is one of the key ingredi-ents of our success,” says Chandra.

This transparency, along with theircore competencies, has served Vernalis

Systems well in breaking ground withinnew cultures. It has developed a signifi-cant presence in Germany. The Germanmarket, a net exporter of services, is tra-ditionally known for providing engi-neering services as opposed to utilizingthem. Germans are also known for theirappreciation for dedication, commitmentand excellent execution. Through atremendous amount of ambitious mar-

keting and salesmanship, coupled withthe company’s extensive portfolio ofsuccess, they established a foothold inboth computer aided engineering designand IT services.

The Road AheadToday, a decade since its humble begin-ning, the company has been seeing con-stant growth. With about a handful ofcustomer acquisition per year, it ensuresthat the quality is not compromised toquantity.

As the world gears up towardstaking the enterprise solutions, socialmedia applications, and end user so-lutions to the mobile world heavilysupported by major players and plat-forms, the company is making sure itis in the right place to leverage onthis opportunity.

Vernalis Systems is today well po-sitioned to play a very significant rolein providing mobile applications, busi-ness intelligence, application support,and engineering design combined withmedia backed solutions for our globalcustomers. The company is also playing

a predominant role in building solutionsthat pave way to green and environ-mentally conscious corporate and enduser world. To provide additional band-width for the increased clientele and tofurther provide more services to theclients, the company is currently work-ing on setting up offices in the MiddleEast and in the Asia Pacific regions.

Additionally, having garnered var-ied business expertise, the company haslaunched a venture capital fund to en-courage budding entrepreneurs. VernalisSystems already has a stake in multiplecompanies in the areas of logistics, in-frastructure development, and talentmanagement. These entities togetheremploy over 1,000 people. “The idea isto diversify and try applying the busi-ness lessons learnt over the years, andinfluence these businesses in a positiveway,” says Chandra.

The company actively promotescommunity welfare and takes a uniqueapproach by providing a platform toits staff members to contribute to thedifferent channels of social welfare or-ganizations. Among several welfareinitiatives, it is notable that VernalisSystems has joined hands with RangDe a non-profit micro financing or-ganization. Many of its employees aresocial investors through Rang De inextending help to the needy. The com-pany not only does social investmentbut also contributes its time and effortto Rang De.

Having closely worked with energyconservation associations, Vernalis Sys-tems also has become a well informedenergy consumer itself and promotes en-ergy conservation and environmentfriendly approach in all possible ways inits daily life. The company actively pro-motes greening solutions and providessubsidized technology support to globalenergy conservationists.

With the ideology of not fallinginto the rat race and growing at one’sown pace instead of the industry de-mands, Vernalis Systems continues tostand for a cause.


JV Partners CustomerRelationship

EnablementTeam

VS BusinessRelationship

Team

TechnologyTeam

Costs Success

ValueProposition

Revenue

CustomerSegments

Vernalis Systems Business Model

“Due to the lateral experience in different industriesthe company helps customers right from the earlyrequirement definition stage and counsels aboutright tools one can deploy to lessen the cost andmake the process simpler”


India’s inspiration machine andformer President Dr. APJ AbdulKalam had shared his vision ofIndian tele-density reachingover 75 percent well before the

year 2020. Keeping alive his expecta-tions, the urban tele-density hasreached the 100 percent landmark andthe rural tele-density is slowly shoot-ing up. The overall tele-density has in-creased to 58.17 percent in July 2010.Indian telecom industry is in a rapidexpansion phase with more operatorsand subscribers adding up in a fast andsteady rhythm. Given the fact thatmost of the providers offer free con-nections, the subscriber base is shoot-ing up each day. The competitionbetween the operators has intensifiedto a state that they are actually com-peting to slash prices.The penetration of mobile connectionsin India has been skyrocketing in thelast couple of years. A Gartner studypredicts that mobile connections inIndia will cross 660 million, growingat 27.3 percent in the current year. Therevenue from mobile services is ex-pected to reach $19.8 billion by theend of the year, up by 19.7 percentfrom last year. The customer base hasincreased tenfold from 46 million in2001 to 470 million in 2010. The In-dian mobile industry is expected toscore a double-digit growth rate till theend of 2012 and the penetration of mo-bile connections is projected to reach

72.5 percent by 2012 and 82 percentby 2014.

Rural market is the center of focusfor the operators now. By introducingmore low-priced handsets, everyprovider is trying to made inroads tothe villages and expand their reach tothe remote areas.

Bharti Airtel tops the list of tele-com service providers in terms of rev-enues with Rs. 38,800 crore. Althoughsaw a dip in its revenue for the secondconsecutive year, BSNL still holds thesecond spot with revenue of Rs.

30,240 crore. Vodafone becomes thethird largest player with revenue of Rs.23,200 crore. Reliance Communica-tions recorded revenue of Rs 22,130crore coming at the fourth place. Thefifth place is held by Aditya BirlaGroup’s Idea Cellular with revenue ofRs. 11,390 crore.

The government has received awhooping revenue of Rs. 67,719from the 3G allocation earlier thisyear. The private operators who havespent large amounts on 3G biddingare worried over its success in thenear future as generally only an 80-90 percent penetration determinessuccess of a particular technology.Many analysts believe that 2G willstill rule the roost for at least the nexttwo to three years and feel that only10 percent of the population will mi-grate to 3G any time sooner. Al-though delayed for a few months,most of them are planning to roll outtheir 3G services by the year end.

Looking at the rapid growth ofIndian telecom sector, some foreseea point of saturation at some time inthe distant future. Is there going to bean opposite turn at which point theindustry will stabilize itself in termsof pricing and offers? Should we fearof a market collapse in telecom in-dustry as a result of intensified com-petition? If it happens ever, it willonly be the strongest players whowould survive.

IndianTelecom Industry Sees A

Saturation Point Ahead?

TECHNOLOGY

An operation Aurora loot-ing intellectual propertyfrom Google, Adobeand Microsoft;$1,109,790 stolen from

many firms at UK; Zeus Trojan packsfor personalized malware available at$700 online; 92 percent of MNCs ex-periencing a malicious security breachat some time according to Pricewater-house Coopers and the question —‘Are enterprises prepared for new gencyber attacks?’

Gone are those days when cyberattacks were an issue of unease only tothe government and military. In-creased use of internet-enabled de-vices in the workplace has paved wayfor big time cyber attacks in enter-prises by a better resourced and so-phisticated breed of cyber criminals.One of the main reasons why busi-nesses have become more vulnera-ble is the proliferation of newtechnologies and the growing depend-ence on IT. A research carried out byAccenture showed that 73 percent oforganizations believe they have ade-quate policies in place to protect sen-sitive information, yet more than halfhave lost sensitive data within the pasttwo years.

Alarms started off in mid-Decem-ber, when Google detected a highly so-phisticated and targeted attack on theircorporate infrastructure originatingfrom China that resulted in the theft ofintellectual property. Much to theirwoes, it was not constrained to Chinabut went on to access Gmail accounts

based in U.S. and Europe. Infiltrationhappened through accounts of humanactivists in China but was identified tohave aimed not just Google but twentyother large companies from a widerange of businesses—including the In-ternet, finance, technology, mediaand chemical sectors.It was followed by arecent hacking ofFord MotorCredit Co.’sc o m p u t e rdatabase thatillustrates thepotential lossand devastationpresent incyber-risk. En-tering through a data-

baseo p e r -ated bycredit-reportingagency Experian, hack-ers downloaded the Social Securitynumbers and addresses of 13,000 cus-tomers.

To add to the story, Cyber attacksare on a rampage with applicationslike Adobe Flash, PDF or Internet Ex-plorer frequently targeted by attackers.Adobe, which had to face the musicthis time, saw a top web-based attackfrom April to June, related to mali-cious PDF activity, which accounted

for 42 percent of total attacks. Over thepast four months, an average of 130instances of malware were foundevery day simply by searching forcontent on popular, “trending” topicsvia Twitter, Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

According to the Secu-rity Tracking Studycarried out by thePonemon Institute inAugust this year, 83 per-cent of multinationalcompanies believe theyhave been the target of acyber attack over the past12 months. A Cyber securitysurvey by Narus says morethan 71 percent of respon-dents are concerned that theircompany is not equipped toprotect itself from cyber at-

tacks; approximately 88 per-cent think thegovernment is not

equipped to protect itself. The survey by Narus pro-

poses a ‘cyber security ecosystem’to tackle this issue. Realizing that onecompany cannot possibly offer tech-nology and services to cover the vastneeds among organizations, cyber se-curity vendors must cooperate witheach and form a “cyber securityecosystem” and to offer more value totheir customers. Improvement ofareas like security training, awarenessand comprehension of threats by ex-ecutive management and security au-dits can also tackle cyber terrorism toan extent.

Cyber AttacksEnterprises far from Equipped!

TECHNOLOGYBy Binu Paul By Renjith VP


With customer satis-faction and cus-tomer delight beingthe cornerstone ofsuccess in today’s

corporate world, Customer Relation-ship Management (CRM) plays a vitalrole in ensuring organizational effi-ciency and success. From enhancingrelationships with existing customers,identification of potential customers,assessing customer needs, serving as asales and marketing enabler to ensur-ing efficient dissemination of cus-tomer information throughout anorganization, Customer RelationshipManagement is an efficient businessstrategy that uses technology to notonly organize and automate customer-centric business processes but alsostrengthen customer relationships andoffer increased customer value.

In today’s highly competent CRMvendors market, choosing an idealCRM solution can be challenging. Thekey to identifying the right CRM so-lution lies in understanding how it willaddress your overall corporate goalsand objectives. The first step in select-ing an ideal CRM solution is to iden-tify the specific CRM objectives to be

a d -dressed. Howcan customerrelationships bestrengthened? Isthere a need for marketing, sales andservice activity automation? How cancustomer service be improved? Howcan operating costs be reduced? Isthere a unified source of customer in-formation available to employeesacross the organization? Identifyingthese CRM objectives, linking themwith the overall corporate objectivesand ensuring active leadership in-volvement from day one will deter-mine how effective a CRM solutioncan be to your business.

Perhaps the most important factorto consider when choosing a CRM so-lution is the level of functionality re-quired. Does the solution offerreal-time updates of customer infor-mation and feature detailed analysis,tracking and forecasting capabilities?Does it address the automation of eachmodule in the marketing, sales andservice lifecycles? What are the vari-ous customer touch points or commu-nication channels supported? Does thesolution offer a complete, unified view

of customer informa-tion and interaction? Theseare some of the key function-ality considerations to be ob-

served.Cost efficiency is another major

deciding factor while considering aCRM solution. As in the case of anyinvestment, the ROI should justify theinvestment. In today’s era of customerexperience, fostering customer rela-tionships yields bigger returns. CRMsolutions enable considerable reduc-tions in operating costs and contributeto higher revenues. Conducting a cost-benefit analysis plays a vital role in re-alizing the need of a CRM solution.Ascertaining if the CRM solution is tobe On-Premise or Hosted should alsobe factored in while considering aCRM solution. Data security consid-erations should be given paramountimportance while deciding on an on-premise or hosted solution. Whilehosted solutions yield a faster returnon investment, on-promise solutionsensures data security. Organizationsshould, therefore, weigh out the bal-ance between faster ROI versus secu-rity considerations.

Is the CRM solution scalable to ac-

commodate future growth and evolvewith growing business requirements?As businesses grow, the need for CRMsolutions to expand in a cost-efficientmanner will be critical in ensuring theeffectiveness of the CRM solution inthe long run. Users that anticipategrowth should ensure CRM solutionsare capable of being rapidly scalablewithout disrupting existing systemsand IT infrastructure.

How soon can the CRM solutionbe deployed? In today’s fast pacedworld, time is money and rapid de-ployment time plays an important rolein realizing faster ROI of a CRM so-lution. While rapid deployment is es-sential, it should not come at the costof quality. An ideal CRM solutionshould adhere to rapid deploymentschedules while ensuring quality andcatering to complexity and customiza-tion requirements.

CRM solutions revolve aroundcustomer focus and customer cen-tricity. Customizing to cater to thedemanding customer requirements isof paramount importance in any in-dustry and more so in the CRM in-dustry. While seeking a CRMsolution, determining the level of

customization required and ensuringthe CRM vendor can cater to theserequirements is essential. A back-ground check on the CRM vendors’experience, client list and productmaturity can be a rewarding exercisein deciding if they will be able tocater to specific requirements. Doesthe CRM solution feature localiza-tion support with local language op-tions and local support capabilities?This is particularly useful when deal-ing with international customers.

Ease of integration with existinglegacy systems is one of the key con-cerns when implementing a CRM so-lution. The ability to make upgradesand enhancements to the existing ITinfrastructure without altering the ex-isting IT infrastructure should be an-other parameter to be kept in mindwhile choosing a CRM solution.

One of the key reasons that causethe unsuccessful utilization of aCRM solution is inadequate user

adoption. Ensuring the applicationuser interface is familiar to the userand highly user friendly is imperativeto the efficient use of the CRM solu-tion. Does the solution offer easynavigation and offer a unified, 360˚view of customer information by in-tegrating data from various chan-nels? An easy-to-use solution that isself explanatory will ensure less stafftraining, lesser implementationcosts, efficient user adoption andfaster ROI.

Choosing an ideal CRM solutioncatered to specific business require-ments can make a world of differencenot only to customer relationshipsbut organizational profitability aswell. Clearly established expecta-tions and objectives by both user andvendor coupled with committed man-agement involvement and dedicateduser adoption will seal the deal in re-alizing a satisfying and rewardingCRM experience.

CCRRMM SSoolluuttiioonn Choosing the

for Your Business

TECHNOLOGY

Choosing an ideal CRM solution catered to speci�c businessrequirements can make a world of difference to both customer relationships and organizational pro�tability

By Team Talisma

JOB FAIRSenior Techie

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tions judiciously and introducing andembracing new processes. This in-cludes restructuring the servicemodel to more of a service manage-ment model that focuses on the enduser’s perspective of the quality of ITservice.

What is a best practice?Application performance managementis about people, process and technol-ogy bound together to keep the busi-ness competitive and attractive, and toretain customers by improving the out-put to the end users.

A practice becomes “best” whencontinual measuring of the process ad-justment indicates you have movedfrom where you started to where youwanted to go. Following are 10 bestpractices for effective applicationmanagement as you begin buildingyour virtualized environment:

1. Develop an application perform-ance management planThe plan is the most important part ofapplication performance managementand should be undertaken from the endusers’ point of view. Understand endusers’ expectations, develop SLAs thatare meaningful to them, and recognizethat you will continually tweak yourplan as more of your environment isvirtualized.

2. Create a project team that hasthe same goalsThe team must understand that for avirtualization initiative to besuccessful, the organization must walkbefore it can run. This means startingsmall, measuring and monitoring theparts of your environment that havebeen virtualized, and slowly addingmore. It means adjusting to new toolsand approaches to effectively protectand maintain the environment.

3. Make sure the end user perspec-tive and your applications’ capabil-ities in the virtual environment are

communicated, documented andunderstood throughout all of ITThis is critical to improving the deliv-ery of performance to end users, aswell as making sure IT is aligned withthe business goals.

4. Understand all components ofyour environment and how they in-teractMany of the challenges of managingapplications in a virtual environmentstem from the way virtualization tech-nology leverages the four core re-sources: CPU, memory, disk, andnetwork. By understanding the impactof resource sharing, and gaining in-sight into the key components of thevirtual environment – data centers,data stores, clusters, resource pools,ESX servers, and VMs – your organi-zation can better support the applica-tions running in the virtualenvironment.

5. Know your applications and whatvirtualization will do to themKnow the application’s technical pa-rameters, measure and monitor themcontinuously before you start buildingyour virtual environment and after.

6. Carefully choose the software so-lutions you need to facilitate optimalperformance of your virtual infra-structureWeigh the complexity and the cost ofsolutions, and choose those thatallow you to see the entire virtualiza-tion infrastructure in a single view togain understanding of how it impactsthe entire application environment.

7. Have the capability to determinethe root cause of an incident orproblem before end users are af-fectedA good understanding of the way thecomponents of your virtual environ-ment work and interact will help to de-termine the root cause of incidents,and meet performance and SLA ob-

jectives. Combine that understandingwith tools that help you determine aproblem exists, communicate why it’sa problem and show how to resolve it.8. Measure business-critical appli-cation performance and communi-cate findings to business leadersShow them the business-critical appli-cation performance history in a waythat is relevant to them (number ofsuccessful transactions, availability,etc.).

9. Act on your findingsWith business leaders, examine the ap-plication performance history to deter-mine what the problems are, andcreate a plan to improve it. Make sureyou take into account both current andplanned future work, and any changesin business priorities. Reprioritizeyour processes from both IT and busi-ness perspectives, and make thechanges that will provide the most re-turn and flexibility, but also reducecost and risk.

10. Continuously measure and mon-itor everything in your virtual envi-ronmentStart by measuring what you under-stand, with the end user in mind. Trackmeasurements over time to see trends,and develop a baseline. You need toknow where you are to show improve-ment when your processes take you toa different level.

Virtualization must be implementedwith care and planning if it is to suc-cessfully support applications and min-imize negative effects on end users.With a sound plan, processes that pro-mote optimal performance of the vir-tual infrastructure, knowledge of howand where to contain the costs of im-plementing a virtual environment, and agood understanding of both the envi-ronment and its applications, you canvirtualize with confidence and your or-ganization can fully realize the benefitsof virtualization.

Virtualization haschanged the world ofIT, as it provides signif-icant cost savings andbusiness flexibility. It

also brings new and difficult chal-lenges to application management,making the traditional, physical per-formance monitoring tools and ap-proaches insufficient for the virtualworld.

Virtualization slows down re-sources and may create conflicts at thephysical level that will impact appli-cation performance. Other challengesfacing IT include monitoring thehealth of the virtual machines, analyz-ing data, alerting staff to problems,and performing additional administra-tive tasks. All of these issues requireboth a new approach and new genera-tion of solutions to ensure continuousservice delivery and support.

Virtualization facilitates increasedbusiness continuity, disaster recovery,flexibility, and agility; reduced down-time and cost, operational efficienciesin backup, high availability and stor-age. Savings come from the consoli-

dation of hardware, including mainte-nance, hardware upgrades and addi-tional application-driven hardwarepurchases that no longer are necessary,as well as elimination of multiple soft-ware purchases for all the hardware.Reduced man power and less powerconsumption also means reduced util-ity costs.

Many organizations don’t fullyreap the benefits of virtualization be-cause their virtual infrastructures arehindered not just by the challenges,but also by poorly performing appli-cations that don’t meet SLAs or end-user needs. End users need to stayproductive and satisfied with the per-formance of the system, so an effec-tive application management planshould, first and foremost, considertheir perspective and eliminate per-formance issues that hinder their pro-ductivity.

Good planning and a set of bestpractices are the keys to a well-devel-oped virtual environment that achievesoptimal performance, contains costsand provides significant ROI to the or-ganization, and ensures the virtualiza-

tion initiative effectively supports end-user objectives and business-criticalapplications.

To meet the operational challengesof virtualization you need to have athorough understanding of your virtualinfrastructure, and manage the rela-tionships and interactions between allof the components in the environment.To start with, thoroughly understandthe technological maturity of your or-ganization. Does it have a low level ofmaturity, with little monitoring, achaotic environment and frequent cus-tomer complaints? Or, is it a highlymatured organization in which SLAsare always met and customers are to-tally happy.

An application performance man-agement plan must be a continuousimprovement process that evolves asthe needs of the organization change.It is important to continuously under-stand and monitor your organization’smaturity at all levels once initiated.Other steps to mitigate performance is-sues that affect business-critical oper-ations include measuring everythingcontinuously, choosing software solu-

10 BEST PRACTICESfOR EffECTIVE APPLICATIONMANAGEMENTIN A VIRTuAL ENVIRONMENT

TECHNOLOGY By Edgardo Salinas ContrerasThe Author is Head - ADM, Quest Software


School education market in India:Opportunity paradoxThere have been so many studies andestimates which have painted a veryrosy picture of India’s School Educa-tion market. It is currently pegged atmore than $40 billion promising adouble digit annual growth rate. So farso good, however anyone who getssmitten by this side of story, needs tobe highly careful. If we look a bit

deeper we shall know that this sectormay show lots of promise but chal-lenges over-shadow the hope and op-portunities that exist. Educationcontinues to be a Not-for-Profit indus-try in India which makes many gen-uinely interested private players stayaway from the core business opportu-nity of setting-up and running brickand mortar schools. At the same time,efforts by Govt. through its schooling

system have shown limited results.India’s 75000 odd private schools ac-count for 7 percent of total institutionsbut enroll 40 percent of country’s 219million students. About 142 mn chil-dren are not in the schooling system.

Other major business opportunityexists in the form of tutoring and manymom and pop stores are making merry.How much does this appeal to the con-science of an interested corporateplayer has to be seen since tutoring islooked down upon by many. Lots ofplayers are also operating in areas likepre-schooling, school ERP’s, text-books/stationery items and provisionof other technology enabled learningsolutions etc. Apart from text-books,stationery and related items, otherbusiness opportunities have justopened up and many players are en-tering these segments every day. Tech-nology enabled learning solutionsspace has seen lots of excitement inthe past few years. More and moreschools are experimenting with tech-nology solutions to provide for toolsthat positively impact learning inschools. However as happens with anygreat business opportunity, lots ofsmall and big entrants try to make aquick buck by churning out unmindfuland half-baked solutions, at the clickof a button. Well meaning and well in-tentioned schools who really want tomake a difference to the learningecosystem for their students unfortu-nately end up burning their fingers. Itis therefore extremely important for

any institution to be very careful in se-lecting the right technology and con-sider its consequences in detail. Theymay not only end up wasting hugesums of money but also playing withthe lives of hundreds of young mindswhose future is trusted to a school byparents.

Challenges in successfully integrat-ing technology solutions in schools:‘Wonders of technology’ is a themethat every teacher and every studentwould have spent reams of paper writ-ing on. However we need to under-stand that technology in itself inneither a genie nor a master. It is what-ever we make out of it. NIIT has beeninvolved in bringing up people andcomputers together successfully forover 27 years now. Our work in tech-nology in K-12 education space inIndia over the past decade has given ussome rare insights into kind of chal-lenges that schools faces in integratingtechnology successfully:

Lack of integrated solutionsSchools as a rule always fail to see thebigger picture while trying to integrateICT into their system. Their approachat best is piecemeal. Normally aschool spends on setting up a com-puter lab and creates a small computerdepartment that takes care of computereducation program of the school.When it comes to automating theback-office operations, it is seen as aseparate activity and without fail somelocal player holds the key to their ad-ministration engine. If it comes to in-tegrating technology in classroomthere will be another vendor vyingtheir attention. There is a severe prob-lem of lack of an integrated solutionwhich can address the needs of all thestake holders like students, teachers,management etc with a single solu-tion. A school as a result has to eitherdeal with multiple vendors for differ-ent solutions or at times develop in-house solutions. This leaves the school

management with the trauma of inte-grating the piecemeal solutions intotheir system and sub-optimal utiliza-tion of resources.

Lack of right pedagogy in learningsolutionsFor technology to make sense to itsusers in educational institutions, it isimperative to have a strong pedagogi-cal framework. After all it is not abouttechnology but about education. It hasbeen observed that off-the shelf tech-nology solutions end up impacting thelearning ecosystem negatively by cre-ating a passive learning environment.Technology over-shadows the realpurpose of learning.

Hardware focus without emphasiz-ing on contentGenerally schools like to believe thatmore the hardware, the better is thesolution. Nothing can be farther fromtruth. Be it in classrooms or in labo-ratories, the content is the key to theeffectiveness of a solution. Even inthe case of content schools are lead tobelieve that more the content the bet-ter it is. This happens to push aggre-gated content to un-suspectingschools under the garb of coveringentire syllabus and all topics. Cus-tomers also tend to get carried awayby look and feel. One needs to under-stand that quantity of hardware andcontent in a learning solution is thelast thing that a school should lookfor. Aggregated content has obviousissues of irrelevance to the curricu-lum being followed by the school.

IT skilling and Change managementThese are perhaps most critical factorsfor successfully integrating technol-ogy in the learning ecosystem of aschool. It is easier to get children used

to technology however the biggerchallenge is to impact the mindset ofteachers and support staff. A simplehardware support does not work.Teachers need a specific type of sup-port which may be more academicthan technical. While office staff mayneed detailed training and re-trainingon features of a solution. One sizedoes not fit all is the mantra here.

Total Cost of OwnershipMany times a school, while goingahead to adopt a solution, overlooksthe total cost of owning a solution.There may be lots of hidden costs in-volved in use of a solution. Some-times even if it is considered, the costis highly underestimated. These costscan include hidden costs like higherelectricity bills, consumables, secu-rity etc.

Obsolescence of technologyTechnology gets outdated very fast. Itis very important for a school to con-sider before purchase, which is an ap-propriate technology to invest in.Newer technologies are being rolledout which reduce the impact of obso-lescence. It is better if a school goesthrough an extensive exercise of defin-ing the vision and scope of IT integra-tion program and involve other partieswho can help them in coming up witha well defined plan.

Successful Integration of Technology inSchools- Opportunities and Challenges

It is very rightly said that ‘Nothing is permanent but change’. However ifwe look at how the world has changed around us in the last fewdecades, it would be right to say that more than change, the pace atwhich change happens, is fascinating to watch . One of the most impor-tant contributors to this mind-boggling change and its pace has been

technology. As in other spheres of human life, the impact of technology inhow we educate our kids or how they educate themselves is also of great sig-nificance. In this write up we shall dwell a bit on the challenges we face aswell as opportunities that lie ahead of us in integrating technology successfullyinto our learning ecosystem in schools. The focus will be on private schools ofIndia since the govt. K-12 education institutions are still in the infancy stageas far as integrating technology is concerned.

The Author is President - School Learning Solutions, NIIT

TECHNOLOGY By Sanjiv Pande

Technologyenabled learning solutionsspace hasseen lots of excitement inthe past few years especially as schools are experimenting with it toprovide toolsthat positively impact learning inschools.

Generally schools liketo believe that morethe hardware, the be�er is the solution.Nothing can be fartherfromtruth


The number one challenge facingorganizations that want to providereal-time access to real-time data isintegrating an ever growing amountof information from heterogeneousenterprise IT environments. Thismust be done while ensuring no serv-ice interruptions or performancedegradation to critical business appli-cations. Data integrity must also beassured as information is moved be-tween systems

.High performance data integrationMany organizations are wary of dataintegration projects, believing theyinvolve data migrations that are com-plicated, expensive, and likely to im-pact day-to-day operations. However,data integration and replication solu-tions exist that facilitate the capture,routing, transformation, and deliveryof transactional data between hetero-geneous databases in real time withminimal overhead. Best of all, thebenefits of data integration can be feltalmost immediately.

Take Hyundai Securities as an ex-ample. To ensure its systems couldutilize information from a range ofsources, the investment bank imple-mented a data integration solutionthat captures and updates critical in-formation as changes occur withoutimpacting on the source system ornetwork performance. This providescontinuous data synchronizationacross heterogeneous environmentsand enables real-time updates.

For Hyundai Securities, thismeans transactions are based on con-sistent information even if they takeplace between different systems.Transactions are completed faster,more efficiently, and with minimalwait time for customers. The bankcan now process over 5,000 transac-tions per second, more than fivetimes the number it could completepreviously.

India’s largest department storechain, Shoppers Stop, has also bene-

fitted from faster data refreshes. Thecompany uses a data integration toolto load information about customerbuying patterns and store sales per-formance from multiple enterprise re-source planning systems into its datawarehouse. This reduced the time ittook to refresh data in the data ware-house from half a day to one hour,which ensured managers receivedtimely sales, inventory, and loyaltyprogram data. As a result, they canbetter analyze which products areselling through stores and maintainoptimum inventory levels.

Accurate customer viewsThe ability to access integrated datato build an accurate customer profilewill help organizations tailor theirofferings and increase sales oppor-tunities. For instance, a better un-derstanding of customer groups hasmade it easier for Hyundai Securi-ties to undertake targeted marketing.This can help improve campaign re-sponse rates and potentially delivergreater revenue to the securitiesfirm.

Similarly, Shoppers Stop can an-alyze customer buying behavior,which helps managers develop mar-keting campaigns that meet the re-quirements of specific customersegments based on their purchasinghistory.

Ensuring compliance and data se-curityData integration solutions can helporganizations that operate in multi-ple locations to capture and distrib-ute information from a centraldatabase. The Bombay Stock Ex-change deployed a data integrationand replication tool to synchronize

and integrate data across mixed en-vironments, avoiding the need forexpensive data migration. Transac-tional data is captured from its coresystem, delivered to multiple targetdatabases at several locations, andmade available online for analysis.

This allowed the stock exchangeto meet regulations set out by theSecurities and Exchange Board ofIndia that required daily stock trans-actions to be monitored online inreal time. In addition, transactionaldata was replicated at a disaster re-covery site to eliminate downtime

caused by planned and unplannedoutages and adhere to regulatoryguidelines around data security.

Lower total cost of ownershipBecause data integration solutionssupport the legacy databases of het-erogeneous systems and integrateinformation from these systems inreal time, organizations can avoidthe need for costly data migrationactivities, as Hyundai Securitiesfound. Its solution also reduced theadministrative burden on the firm’sstaff by eliminating manual transac-tions. As a result, it has reducedtotal cost of ownership while in-creasing the availability and timeli-ness of information.

Real-time data is a necessity not aluxury for today’s growing busi-nesses. A data integration solutionthat use unique log-based change datacapture and replication technologythat enable the capture, routing,transformation and delivery of trans-actional data between multiple data-bases in real time can be deployedquickly, cost-effectively and withminimal impact on the business.

Power Information

Real-Time of

The

The author is Senior Vice President, Oracle FusionMiddleware, Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific Division

TECHNOLOGY By Roger Li

With more organizations operating around theclock in multiple locations and time zones, theneed for real-time information is imperative.

Many organizations are waryof data integration projects,believing they involve data

migrations that are complicated, expensive, andlikely to impact day-to-day

operations.

Everyone knows the importance of real-time ac-cess to real-time information. Organizationsthat are integrating data from disparate sourcesand distributing it in real time have found thatthey can cut costs, reduce risk and improve

business insight at the same time. With more organizations operating around the clock in

multiple locations and time zones, the need for real-time in-formation is imperative. Data must be continuously avail-able for transactional processing by mission-critical systemsand to support business intelligence activities. It must alsobe accessible across the enterprise, anywhere in the world.

As most business activities today are transaction-based—whether making purchases, paying bills, updatingaccount information or managing patient records withinhospital networks—end users are demanding the right to ac-cess, analyze, act on, integrate, store, and verify transac-tional data, often in real time and without systeminterruption or downtime.


Cloud computing shouldbe the most talked aboutbuzzword today. Hardlya day passes when one isnot confronted with one

or other newly brewed material on thesubject. No surprise that it is discussedaround many drawing boards today asthe next big thing hitting us after theWEB.

There are many cautious souls whohave seen the hysterical drive aroundthe internet & WEB technologies dur-ing the dot com days and the bubblethat followed leaving many scattered.While a decade down the line there isa clear unison that the WEB is here tostay and is becoming ever more em-bedded into our lives. The bandwidth,

security, browser capability etc. re-quired its own time to attain the levelof maturity to deliver services at thelevel acceptable to make web as pop-ular a platform as foreseen during thedays of the dot com bubble.

Similarly the success and the broadacceptance of Cloud Computing isgoing to be based on a few enablingtechnologies. What is interesting tonote is the level of maturity attained bymany of these technologies at the time

of this writing. Therefore we try to analyze these

technologies from the technologyviewpoint and understand the crucialrole played by some of the technologyadvancement making Cloud Comput-ing a reality.

Virtualization: Basically a technologythat abstracts the various hardwaresubcomponents and permits multi-ten-anting a system and thereby optimiz-

ing the hardware usage. An essentialcomponent for any public cloud (a fac-tory scale capacity meant for broadconsumption mostly on internet) or aprivate cloud (an exclusively deployedcapacity typically in secured networkof the owner). It is no more the elitetechnology reserved to mainframe sys-tems, the choice of very matured & sta-ble virtualization software fromlicensed to open source software aretoday plenty. The virtualization tech-nology embedded by leading processorvendors is a further boost.

Bandwidth cost: The bandwidth priceof network has come down to a pointthat it is suddenly making it com-pelling to access an entire suite of serv-ices from internet. This means thebusiness case for a public or a commu-nity cloud (very similar to public cloudby meant for consumption by a closedcommunity) becomes much easier. Thebandwidth cost is expected to ease fur-ther and making it ever more com-pelling.· X86: The significant performance& reliability improvement recentlyseen with systems based on x86processor is pulling more customer andas well equally the ISVs to embrace itfor critical business systems. Suddenlywe see commodity hardware capableof delivering large scale business criti-cal services in a private or a publiccloud at compelling price points. Spe-cific RISC, GPU based processors willalso have a role to play in the cloud,but is expected to attract only niche ap-plications.

Blades: Blade based systems havebrought in unprecedented level of opti-mization in datacenters today. Whilethe shared chassis meant better com-pute per watt of electricity, it also meantextreme flexibility in engineering andmaintaining datacenters. The IMAC(Install, Add, Move and Change) onhardware is suddenly simplified to afew minutes of physical work.

Unified management: Convergenceof Hardware and the network inter-connects is not only cutting down thedatacenter floor space but also en-abling single unified management ofdatacenter hardware. Something thathas been the struggle with all the En-terprise Management Software. Thismeans the overall capacity for a pri-vate or a public cloud can be man-aged as a single entity.

Next Generation Datacenters:Mostoften the business case for a cloud isbroken at the datacenter level, thelegacy cooling and build nature ofdatacenter meant limited scope forhandling scale unit type capacities re-quired in a private or a public cloudto optimize the operation cost. Thenew generation of datacenters is per-mitting modular handling of capaci-ties and making it possible to packhuge capacities in small unit foot-prints.

Licensing & distribution: ISVs andlicensing has always been an issue onvirtualized platforms, virtualizationmeant reduced license sale and hencevigorously opposed by many soft-ware suppliers. With virtualizationnow accepted as an essential compo-nent in a datacenter, the software ven-dors not accepting a licensing modelfor virtualized system is only a hand-ful. This and the advent of virtual ap-

pliances as a distribution format aremaking rapid enablement of serviceson private clouds. The same is alsovalid for the IaaS (Infrastructure as aservice) and SaaS (Software as aservice) and also PaaS (Platform as aService)

Analyzing Cloud Computingfrom this perspective makes one be-lieve there is no real technical reasonwhy Cloud should not be the next bigthing coming our way in the Informa-

tion Technology evolution. Theremay still be non- technical issues likelegal, compliance and some legisla-tive in nature, which is going to holdback many from taking the publiccloud way immediately. But most ofthese concerns doesn’t hold good fora secure Private Cloud and thereforein all probability will be the first step-ping stone for an enterprise to adoptcloud in steps.

A real success of Cloud means weare going to take many mundane nonstrategic expenses going towards deliv-ering and consuming information tech-nology for today’s consumers either forenterprise or individuals.

Software developers are able tomaximize spend on developing theircore IP and not spending on multi-plat-forming, testing, packaging, distributionetc., means we can expect a radical newlevel of innovation coming our way. In-novations we believe will also solvesome of our fundamentals problems.

TechnologiesDriving Cloud

Computing

The author is GM - Compute & Storage Practice,Wipro India, Middle East and Africa

TECHNOLOGY By Saji Thoppil

The bandwidth price of network has come down to apoint that it is compelling toaccess an entire suite ofservices from internet.

Blade based systems havebrought unprecedented level ofoptimization in datacenters today.


DDiivveerrssiittyy 3. Democratic: At the project incep-

tion stage and at specific intervals ofproject review, it is good to have ademocratic style of leadership, asthis would allow the end product tobe more innovative and have its owndifferentiating factors. This wouldallow the staff to have a high senseof personal growth and participation.Most of the IT companies have ayoung workforce that in itself bringsin the democratic culture.

4. Transformational:While leading alarge project or a program with hun-dreds of staff, transformational lead-ership would be more effective. Theleader has integrity, sets clear goals,communicates the vision, inspires,and expects the best from the teamthat acts in a Liassez-Faire manner.This would be applicable when thestaff is trustworthy and experienced.A person with lots of tenacity and pa-tience to make change fits here.

5. Transactional: For BPO deliverymanagement, a transactional leader-ship style ensures a better compli-ance to the service level agreementsor the key performance indicatorsthat have been set in for the process.

6. Creative: While developing a newIT product that is expected to be theIntellectual Property (IP) of the com-pany or re-engineering a businessprocess, it is necessary to provide acreative leadership. This would needa highly diverse team across culturaland national boundaries to be moreeffective. Encourage people from theadvertising or music industry to bepart of such creative groups.

7. Corrective:Agile being a buzzwordin the IT industry, corrective leader-ship is an asset when a product or aproject is being developed in an iter-ative manner, allowing the team towork with freedom and correctingthe output at regular intervals.

8. Intelligent:A consulting team in anIT organization would need intelli-gence leadership that can embracethe future by navigating ambiguityand reframe problems as opportuni-ties.

9. Bridging: While multiple modulesmay be developed by different mod-ule or project leaders, a bridgingleadership style is needed to integrateall the components together andmake sure that the integrated wholebrings more value than its individualparts.

10. Purposeful: An IT organizationalso needs a purposeful leadershipthat brings the leader and the rest ofthe employees together on a com-mon social cause for the commu-nity or the society that theorganization is working in, thus en-suring greater harmony with itslarger stakeholders and the envi-ronment around.

As the IT market picks up again and or-ganizations find it difficult to hire re-sources, we should ask ourselveswhether we are looking at too shallow apool.

Hiring is one of the most difficultdecisions a manager faces and a wrongdecision can cause a serious setback.This means that we end up selecting acandidate with a disposition just likeours – including personality, sensibility,and work style.

In an organization with people ofsimilar backgrounds working togetherfor long periods, it closes the organiza-tion culture and the management’s atti-tude towards outside ideas and theorganization may lose out in the longrun.

All facets of leadership are impor-tant in today’s IT organization. We mustembrace diversity to empower peopleand capitalize on their strengths. It isdifficult for the existing staff to embracediversity as bias and prejudice are

deeply rooted within us and the organi-zation culture must allow a respect forthe difference.

All leaders in the organization mustbe visibly involved in programs affect-ing cultural change and articulate poli-cies that govern diversity. While playingan advisory role for set-up of a garmentretailing shop at Bangalore, I realizedhow important it is to have sales execu-tives who speak English, Hindi, Kan-nada, Tamil, and Telugu to address thedifferent customers visiting the place.Furthermore, the diverse staff under-stood the different festivals, and specificproducts and schemes could belaunched with their inputs. Also, it wasimportant to have both male and femalestaff – female staff tend to be better atcustomer service, while male staff areimportant to handle some other tasks.More so, it was essential to have ayounger and more experienced salesforce, as they could correlate easily witha similar customer group and facilitatecost management.

These are the same diversity ele-ments that become important in an ITindustry. Multicultural and multina-tional teams increase the ability to in-crease sales, account management, andcustomer satisfaction across continents.At the same time, gender diversity isimportant to look at managing teamsworking in 24x7 shifts in a BPO. Variedexperience in the team allows makinga more competitive quote in compari-son with the other providers.

In a nutshell, today’s leader needsto encompass different styles of leader-ship and adapt the leadership style tothe organizational context. Build a di-verse team, identify the strengths ofeach individual in the managementteam and let it be known to others in thegroup, so as to best deploy the talentsfor the corporate objectives to beachieved.

A highly flexible style of leadershipwould allow faster achievement ofgoals and a more satisfied employeeand customer base.

in

Today, the technology industry has reached a state where the leadership po-tential is inherent and developed in the discipline itself. With the pressuresto ramp up fast, corporates feel less of a need to look at the other industriesfor a policy to hire and choose the next leader from the existing team.

On the other hand, innovation, new practices, and differentiating factors tend to de-velop when you mix staff from two different disciplines or depute a person from one in-dustry to another.

The organizational culture becomes dependent on theleadership style and the leader’s background andhence alignment of the corporate objectives withleadership background becomes more vital than thebasic skills.

Different facets of an IT project or an opera-tions process may need different type of leader-

ship.1. Autocratic: An autocratic leadership style becomes

important to ensure that the project schedules are met.It leads to an effective supervision with faster de-

cision making, detailed instructions, and or-ders. It is easier to get work done in anindustry where attrition rates are highand lot of fresh engineers have to be ab-sorbed as trainees. The style leads to amore productive output while theleader is watching. This should be bal-

anced while employees are engaged incultural and bonding activities beyond work

to ensure staff morale is not affected. A personfrom the armed forces background may be in-

cluded to inculcate this practice among the rest of themanagement team.

2. Bureaucratic: To keep the project costs under control, it would need a bu-reaucratic leadership. All the costs are approved as per the procedure or pol-icy although it may allow room for exceptions in specific circumstances. Thecosts need to be approved in pre-set templates and forms and as per the pre-cise rules set in. A public sector background person would infuse the prac-tice of going by the rule book among the rest of the organization.

Technology LLeeaaddeerrsshhiipp

TECHNOLOGY By Ajay Pal Singh Arora


The author is VP, Société Générale


Forrester in one of its 2007 re-port mentioned the need forIndian IT industry to bemore like value add advisorsand innovators and go up the

value chain to compete with the upcom-ing IT work force from different parts ofthe world. While India engineering cen-ters contribute a lot towards “productand solution development and execu-tion”, our contribution towards “productconceptualization, strategic technologyfuture and thought leadership”, needmore impetus. One of the key accelera-tors that will help propel India Engi-neering towards Innovation Excellencewill be the vast talent pool generated byTier -2, Tier-3 colleges in India as theywill be major players of the future of ourIT industry. Touching these studentswhile in college and preparing them forthe Industry with a long term vision ofgoing up in the value chain is a chal-lenge. Seeding these students with theright principles of industry perspectivetechnology learning and work ethics willhelp accelerate the transformation welook for in a few years. Here we articu-late the vision for an ideal student com-ing out of the college, and propose ideason bridging the gaps. We think it is a so-cial responsibility for all of us to be partof this transformation.

Vision We need to strategically profile the idealstudent passing out of the college, interms of Industry requirements. By vi-sion we don’t mean the curriculum orthe contents of the individual courses inuniversities. An ideal student ready for

the industry should be able to independ-ently think about the problem areas tocome up with solutions and have theright attitude towards technology (bothsoftware/hardware) development, inno-vation and team work. He should havethe following key attributes: 1. Drive and creativity in IT problem

solving – Strong in fundamentals,Programming skills, Algorithms.

2. Real Life Technology Exposure –Good exposure to latest open sourcetechnologies and any other majortechnologies. Should have gonethrough at least one complete projectlife cycle with real life technologies.

3. Self Learning Abilities – With the in-formation deluge in the internet era,assimilation of the right informationon demand to produce right results.

4. Courage to delve into the unknown –Ability to move to new technologyareas and learn without expensivetraining or hand holding.

5. Pro-active thinking – More inquisi-tive and questioning in nature to getdeeper understanding of the problemat hand and analyze qualitytradeoffs in algorithms anddesign with propen-sity towards inno-vation.

6. Work ethics andS o f tskills

–Integrity, commitment, hard workand dedication, Good Communica-tion skills, email etiquette.

7. Awareness – In general being awareof the IT industry trends, and the hap-penings in the industry.

Bridging the Gaps How do we bridge the gaps between theIdeal student described above and thestudent passing out of the college? Thereare several factors that contribute to thewidening of the gaps and adopting pro-active measures in the right areas, willhelp narrow the gap and help seed theright principles in the students. Emphasize Self-Learning and Pro-ac-tive Thinking Informational teaching gives the stu-dents a bunch of information on a syl-labus and later subject them to welldefined pattern of questions to whichthey respond reactively. The latter weterm as reactive thinking. This kind ofexposure for 3-4 years tends to restricttheir thinking and creates lots of gravityfor the students to come out of it. Reallife problems and projects quickly tend

to take most of the stu-dents out of the

c o m f o r t

zone and again they rely on training orinformation to solve those situations.Students tend to complement the gapswith private training on specific tech-nologies but quickly realize the need tolearn some other technology and so on.This cannot scale in industry wherequick on-demand learning and parallellearning is a key to success. A consciousfocus on the ability of the students tolearn by themselves i.e., Self-Learningwith guidance and Pro-active thinkinginstead of reactive thinking is required.The nature of the delivery of the coursesyllabus needs some adjustment, andbelow we give a framework of princi-ples under which if we operate, the stu-dents perform better from ourexperience. Subjecting the students tomore patterns based on these principleswill transform them to be industry ready.

Accountability of the Final Year Proj-ects including Work Ethics and SoftSkills More emphasis is required on the natureand execution of the final year project.It should go through the entire projectlife cycle touching open source tech-nologies, industry standard APIs, and aframework needs to be put in place toevaluate the project along these lines.Original coding work on the projectshould be evaluated based on the no. oflines of effective code, innovative ideas,and the actual result produced. Industrypeople should get involved actively inthese projects and they should contributeto the final evaluation as well. WorkEthics and Soft skills evaluation shouldbe integrated with this project delivery -on Integrity, hard work, commitment,dedication, team work, communication,email etiquette and presentation. Stu-dents should go through the entire Proj-ect life cycle concepts – “explore,analyze, prototype, design, implementand integrate “during the execution ofthe project. Students should be encour-aged to do original projects and con-tribute to open source communities thatcan lead to more young entrepreneurs. [[

We have had experiences of studentsbuying “ready-made projects” from out-side and such practices should bestrongly discouraged by the college andNASSCOM should take special effort tobacklist IT companies who provide suchready-made projects to the students. Thisjust reduces the quality significantly.

Effective Jobs and Interviews The demand-supply nature of the IT in-dustry causes intense competitionamong the companies to grab the freshstudents at the earliest. This has resultedin job offers to the students during pre-final year (3rd year) or early final year(7th semester, 4th yr). These job offerstend to cause a sense of relaxationamong the students with only gettingpass marks until they pass out, and a sig-nificant amount of learning is compro-mised during this period. NASSCOMshould give strong guidance to the In-dian companies not to give out job of-fers prior to final semester. JobInterviews should focus on both funda-mentals and more importantly on theoriginality and quality of the projectwork done by the student.

Mandatory Industry-University Con-nection We should pro-actively enable the In-dustry-University Connection with somemeasurable results imposed by NASS-COM on the industry. We should forman Industry wide special interest groupwith investments from individual com-

panies in the form of people who will goand teach students. Colleges should havea mandatory one course in each semes-ter taught by Industry people especiallyon programming languages and funda-mentals. Similarly projects should beguided by one industry guide with re-sponsibility to evaluate the student’s per-formance on project technicals and softskills. While avenues (such as intern-ship) exist today to make this happen,lack of a framework of accountabilityand metrics has resulted in dilution. Ef-forts should be taken to have the indus-try reach for Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges.

Key Principles – The Pillars We believe in the following three keyprinciples along with the above ideas totransform the student to an IT profes-sional. (a) Experiential Learning –where the students should be exposed todifferent real life technologies, experi-ence and understand the nuances andapply them to solve real problems. (b)Rapid Fail-Fast Convergence Model– Students should be encouraged to de-velop real life code and programs, wherethey should constantly go through thecycle of Develop� Fail� Adjust �Learn �Converge. By failing often, thestudents learn fast, and converge to alearning knowledge. (c) Big PictureConnection and Cognition – Studentsshould know the individual pieces of thetechnology puzzle how they fit in the bigpicture (Technology Principles). Stu-dents should know to connect the indi-vidual pieces of the puzzle to formpatterns (Design Patterns). Studentsshould know to think long term based onthe quality tradeoffs to decide on a di-rection of the technology project (Strate-gic Vision). We have successfullyapplied the three principles above inhelping to transform the students to anIndustry Ready Computer Professional.

We presented a holistic view of bridg-ing the gaps in getting a student industryready that will help us set forth a brightfuture for the students to become IT in-novators of our country tomorrow.

GapBridging the Getting the Students

Industry Ready

TECHNOLOGYThe Author is Founder, Datsi

By Srinivasan Viswanathan


cent statistics show that 15 percent ofthe connections are on smartphones,which translates to about 95 millionconnections. On a rough estimate, 50percent of the smartphones are beingused for business purposes. That indi-cates at least 40 to 50 million mobilephone connections that are potentialusers for running mobile business ap-plications. BlackBerry alone has about4,000,00 connections in India.

Mobile phones have even pene-trated rural areas. With the focus ofmany corporations being business atthe bottom of the pyramid, there iswider scope for capturing businesstransactions happening in rural areason smart mobile handsets.

Thus, the next revolution would beto build and deploy mobile businesstransactions by enterprise resourceplanning (ERP) vendors, in close col-laboration with telecom companies.Telecom companies would use theirnetwork reach to be able to connect theERP solutions with the centralizedhosting capabilities they may possessfor the mobile applications. This maypresent a new revenue stream forthem. ERP vendors like SAP are al-ready offering mobile developmentplatform and standard customer rela-tionship management(CRM) andERP-centric transactions that helpbusiness users in sales and customer-facing functions to be able to performtransactions. Integration of mobilebusiness applications back to enter-prise software is a critical requirement,and SAP, for example, already offersthe SAP NetWeaver Process Integra-tor offering to be able to orchestratetransactions.

Some examples of business scenariosthat would be increasingly offered asmobile business applications are:� Traditional workflow approvals in

an organization: PO, expense re-ports, sales order, credit approvals,etc.,

� Field sales management

� Field service management� Utilities: billing and collections� Remote supply chain/rural supply

chain management� Microfinance segments: mobile

SIM card-based banking, loan ap-plication process and approvals,etc.

Mobile business applications can alsooriginate outside the organization —from an end consumer — or from auser who is within the organization. Asan example, for an end consumer-ini-

tiated transaction, imagine one couldchoose a pizza catalogue from his mo-bile and make an order to the pizzacenter nearest to his location. The tele-com company can route the pizzaorder into the ordering system, whichcould be on an ERP application, that ishosted either in their own data centreor within the internal cloud of thepizza company. The ERP softwarerunning within the pizza company canthen process the order, then SMS backto the end user who ordered the pizzathe details of the order and also theexact time when the pizza can be de-livered.

There are many other examplesof how mobile business applicationscan be relevant, even simply withinan organization. A sales executivetracking his or her opportunities or apurchase manager being able to ap-prove purchase orders while on themove are some other examples.

While the situation describedabove is not quite new to the busi-ness world, the change that is nowhappening is the widespread useacross industries and organizations.

The growth of mobile connectionsand the introduction of 3G technol-ogy are fueling this growth, and busi-nesses are also finding smarter waysof doing business and cutting downon cycle times. PDAs are gettingconverged into mobile phones, andthe convergence of mobile businessapplications into mobile phones andiPads is now a possibility. ERP ven-dors like SAP are also increasinglyoffering standard scenarios and tech-nology for their ecosystems to co-in-

novate, including the ability toorchestrate transactions betweenthe mobile business applicationand the ERP application.

The development of the mo-bile business applications wouldincreasingly be built by theecosystems that co-innovate withthe ERP vendors. India, with itshuge population of technically

skilled workers, will see a larger de-veloper community and organiza-tions that are working in synergytoward building these applicationsfor diversified business scenarios.With a view to drive efficiencies,SAP is co-innovating with Sybase tobuild pre-packaged scenarios aroundsales and services functions withinCRM software and enterprise mobil-ity, in order to offer complimentarytechnology solutions. This will en-able SAP to deliver capabilities forits customers and partners to buildmobile business applications accord-ing to their enterprise needs. SAPalso offers business intelligence ca-pabilities through its SAP Busines-sObjects Mobile software, withwhich business users can view BI re-ports on their BlackBerrys and othermobile devices.

Thus, transactions that are beingperformed by business users will in-creasingly be carried out through mo-bile applications, which will greatlyincrease the efficiencies of corpora-tions and cut down the cycle time oftransactions.

Mobile Business ApplicationsNext Advancement inMobile Convergence

Enterprise software has longbeen restricted to businessusers who are expected toperform the transactions orview information with lim-

ited user interface options — normallya laptop or a PC. In today’s context, thedefinition of business usershas been extended to peoplewho perform business func-tions, beyond the transac-tional users. The change hasalso happened with man-agers and senior managerswho seek to access informa-tion on a self-service basis rather thanbe supplied information by others.

The dynamic nature of business aswell as the freedom to operate from dif-ferent parts of the world and at oddtimes have also created a need for alter-native methods of being connected tothe enterprise software that is deployedin organizations. Approvals for transac-tions are expected anytime since, with

many organizations, business is operat-ing almost 24x7.

Mobile business applications are thenext revolution of extending enterprisesoftware to the business end user, whomay carry a smart mobile handset likean iPad, mobile phone, or BlackBerry,

and who is connected online to a net-work on a 24x7 basis. This is especiallyrelevant to the Indian context, with theexplosion in the number of mobile con-nections that have happened recently,and with the introduction of 3G tech-nology. As of July 2010, India has morethan 635 million mobile phone connec-tions and is adding five to six millionnew connections every month. The re-

The author is Vice President-Solution Engineering,SAP Indian Sub-continent

TECHNOLOGY By Rajamani Srinivasan

As of July 2010, India has more than635 million mobile phone connectionsand is adding .ve to six million newconnections every month.

-e development of the mobilebusiness applications would increasingly be built by theecosystems that co-innovatewith the ERP vendors.


range of more advanced mobile serv-ices, such as real-time access to

high-quality audio/video trans-mission. For example, with itsapplication portal, Apple,which has a small percent-age of the handset market,has already changed theway many people interactwith their smart phones,

while Microsoft and Nokiaare also talking up their own

similar portals. The level of per-sonalization and customiza-

tion possible with theseportals will mean newuses, both good andbad, will be found.This presents a bigconcern for corporatenetwork managers asusers are no longer

bound by factory-in-stalled applications. With

this greater usability, con-sumers are now adopting

smart phones in greater num-bers for business and for personal

use. iSuppli Corp. predicted in aMarch 2009 report that the number ofsmart phone shipments is expected togrow to as high as 192.3 million unitsthis year, up 11.1 percent from 2008.

No doubt, the smart phone is be-coming much more personal and in-dispensable to consumers, and whereconsumers go, money goes, and crimewill soon to follow. This adds up to in-creased opportunities for virus infec-tions and attacks that will require afocused approach to secure the mil-lions of handheld mobile devices inoperation today, especially for enter-prises. Smart phones pose an evengreater security risk to corporations asthey have become the mobile officefor their ability to access corporatenetworks in real time, much in the waythat laptops have been able to do. Thispresents cyber criminals with the op-portunity to use smart phones as thelaunch pad for penetrating and access-

ing sensitive corporate data. Fortinetbelieves the increased usability ofsmart phones and other wireless de-vices and the new business modelsthey enable will become the biggestthreat to corporate security in the nearfuture.

The mobile market presents aunique position in terms of malware ascompared to the traditional PC market.The platforms available for attack onPC platforms are limited – Windows,MacIntosh and Linux – while thenumber of mobile platforms continuesto grow: Google Android, Apple mo-bile OS, SymbianOS, Windows Mo-bile, Palm. For example, we are justseeing the tip of the iceberg withGoogle’s Android OS vulnerabilitydiscovered late last year. And just lastmonth, discovery of the new Sym-bOS/Yxes.A!worm (AKA “SexyView”) mobile worm gives strong in-dication that we may be on the edge ofa mobile botnet. This sophisticatedSMS-propagation strategy, whichhosts the worm on malicious servers,allows cybercriminals to effectivelymutate the worm by adding or remov-ing functionality.

A managed client capable of de-tecting software installations and mon-itoring file access in addition toencrypting data and reporting status toa central server is the answer for net-work managers grappling with an ac-tive mobile work force. Networkmanagers will want to look for solu-tions that provide multi-layered pro-tection for blended threats and thatprotects across all device interfaces.The ideal mobile client solution wouldbe part of an integrated, end-to-endnetwork security platform that offersaccelerated hardware and impingesminimum performance impact on userdevice and services. In addition, thenetwork security platform should offerconfiguration management and controlwith reporting, and flexibly-definedprofiles and policies for granular net-work segmentation capabilities.

For the end-user, both corporateand private, here are some tips to fol-low for the safe usage of their mobiledevice:1. Similar to patch management on

PC platforms, apply any updatesto mobile platforms as soon asthey become available. For exam-ple, Google quickly issued a fixedwhen the vulnerability in its opensource Android OS was discov-ered in late 2008. Be educated andaware of threats that bridge to theInternet.

2. Phishing scams looking for bankaccount information or corporatecredentials are very real to hitusers on mobile devices, just asthey are with PCs. Just like socialnetworks, mobile networksthrough voice contacts are highlytrusted. Attempt to verify the iden-tity of any incoming messages thatare suspicious. Reply with some-thing simple like “What is this?”to ensure you are able to confirmthat the source of the message istrusted.

3. Be aware of what you install. Forexample, the worm SymbOS/Be-SeLo used social engineering overMMS to install itself. It promptedthe user to install an applicationwhich had a file extension .mp3 or.jpg; users should be aware of thisand not install anything thathaven’t confirmed as being from atrusted source. Many users have“jailbroken” phones, such as theiPhone, which means that uncon-trolled (unsigned) code can be run.This is a very big security risk,and users should be aware of therisks they take when they unlockphone functionality.

4. Disable communication channelssuch as Bluetooth by default, onlyenabling them on a per-session re-quirement. This removes an attackavenue. By taking simple precau-tionary measures, it effectively helpsto harden your smart device.

SmartphoneA Double EdgeSword for Security

Popularity

Are mobile phones andother wireless devicesthe new weakest link insecuring informationoutside of corporate

networks? We all know that “bad”guys take notice of new tech andgadgets and create attacks based onthe latest trends—-how are enter-prises keeping up? With mobile usageof Facebook and Twitter rising userscan affect enterprise networks easilywithout knowing it. What are somebest practices and concerns to avoidhorrible issues? What should wirelessgurus know about unforeseen securityissues created through wireless de-vices?

While malicious activities onhandheld devices like smart phoneshave been relatively low, there areseveral indicators to suggest thatthings are about to change. Enter-prises will need to start thinking seri-ously about a mobile threatprevention strategy to ensure thattheir networks are not vulnerable tothe new threats that will abound withthe increasing mobile activities oftheir users.

The growing prevalence of 3Gnetworks is enabling broader band-width for mobile devices, whichmeans more of the bad content is get-ting in with the good. 3G also enablesnetwork operators to offer a wider

The author is Regional director, India and SAARC, Fortinet

TECHNOLOGY By Vishak Raman


At a time when even un-born kids flaunt the webwith their own accountsand the cybercrooks glo-betrot virtually to exploit

every network and system, securityproviders have turned to don the rolesof defense forces in the virtual world.A glance in India wherein individualsand corporates turn a blind eye towardsthe severity of cyber war threats makesit imperative to create more awareness.The attempt of SiliconIndia to enlightenthe Indian crowd about cybercrime,malware incidents, data breaches andcompliance legislation through the Sil-iconIndia Security Conference 2010met with an applaudable response.More than 600 attendees packed theNIMHANS Convention Centre in Ban-galore to listen to the experts fromSymantec, Novell, McAfee, Wipro,Mindtree, RSA, Niksun, Juniper Net-works and Paladion.

Securing the NetworksComputers and the networks that con-nect the innumerous computersaround the world have gone on frombeing wondrous innovations to per-vasive business necessities in today’sworld. The challenge to system andnetwork security is the explosion ofInformation. Unsecured informationhas become a liability today. We alsosee the growth of unstructured data

pegging at over 60 percent per year.It is expected that the total volume ofdigital information will reach 1,773exabytes by 2011.

With increasing business dealsbeing carried over the virtual world,systems are getting more complexand heterogeneous and thus moreprone to cyber crime or databreaches. Shantanu Ghosh, Vice Pres-ident, Enterprise Security & IndiaProduct Operations at Symantec im-mediately pinpoints the solutionwhich lies in a connected enterprise.“It can be done through consumeriza-tion of IT, social networking sites,different mobile devices, and cloudand virtualization,” he says. A holis-tic information approach to securityshould be taken in this regard thatshould be risk based and policydriven, information centric with ac-tionable intelligence and well man-aged infrastructure. And when we sayan information centric model, itshould compile information gover-nance, information intelligence andinformation infrastructure.

Data-driven ProtectionNumerous concepts are put on test tounderstand the data structure. Onesuch concept is Network Forensics.While IDS, IPS, Firewalls and LogAnalysis are some of the state of theart cyber defenses available, network

forensics is an evolving field in thesecurity landscape.

Ajit Pillai the Regional Director ofIndia and Middle East at Niksun ex-plains, “Data is recorded, stored and re-constructed in order to discover thesource of security attacks or other prob-lem incidents. This leads us to the un-knowns in the security breach and henceto the truth. And the truth is on thewire.” Cost of a data breach amounts toaround $204 per compromised record.Nearly 50 percent of information resid-ing in enterprises is sensitive. Competi-tion, compliance and credibility blackhole are to be given more importance. Itis revealed that all Indian enterprisessurveyed lost revenue due to cyber at-tacks and an average enterprise explores17 standards and frameworks.

Siliconindia Creates IT Security Awareness

@ Security Conference 2010

Security StandardsA Windows-specific computer wormcalled Stuxnet was discovered on July13, 2010 which was attempting to takecontrol of industrial infrastructurearound the world. It was a Stealthy mal-ware that propagates through USBdrives and exploits 4 zero-day vulnera-bilities. This is just one of the examplesfor the sophisticated nature of computermalwares these days. To overcome suchflaws there are various strategies andtechniques used to design security sys-tems.

However there are few, if any, ef-fective strategies to enhance security.Furthermore, by breaking the system upinto smaller components, the complex-ity of individual components is reduced.In doing so we can maintain the sys-

tem’s quality attributes, among themconfidentiality, integrity, availability, ac-countability and assurance,“ Security isat breach when you have Intel inside butintelligence outside. Security systemsare to be standardized in India. Other-wise, misuse of resources will damagereputation of the company, loss of busi-ness and revenue is affected. It sends outa wrong signal to other staffs. It slowsdown the availability of resources andultimately the productivity of the com-pany is hit,” said Thiruvadinathan An-nadorai (Thiru), who is the PrincipalConsultant for Risk & Compliance, Se-curity services at MindTree.

On similar lines, Bikram Barman,Senior Manager, Engineering, Productsat RSA points that to address these chal-lenges, virtual infrastructure architec-

tures need to have specific security poli-cies and well-defined procedures.Throwing more light on how to designa secured system, Rajiv Motwani whois the Manager, Product Security Engi-neering at Citrix R&D India says,“Server virtualization, virtual storagesolutions and patch management is veryimportant to have real security of infor-mation and consolidation of data.

”Attendees ThrilledThe event with the support of securitybellwethers like Symantec, Loglogic,eEye Digital Security, Paladion andQuickHeal drew attention of manyIT managers. Harsha Thennarasu Ethe IT Head of ISKCON maintainedthat monitoring networks is a majorheadache to the IT heads across or-ganizations and network forensicswill surely take care of that. Therewas a common agreement that theconference had insights for every at-tendee, whether he is an IT expert oran amateur technology user. “It wasquite useful and helped me in gain-ing very wide knowledge on the In-formation warfare, which I wasn’taware of,” says Virendra Yadav fromWipro. Security has always beenlooked over as a tax. Embedding se-curity in the culture of the company’sthought process will reduce the costand will help to create more value forcustomers.

EVENT By Eureka Bharali

This Wipro expert takes on the crowd tosee their security aptness Attendees exchange security tips

Nilanjan De, Co-founder & CTO,iViZ

Shantanu Ghosh enlightens the crowdon various threats

The excited crowd check out the security solutions on display


TTrraannsscceenndd’’ TThhrreeee nneeww 44GGBB DDDDRR33 DDRRAAMMss

Transcend rolled out three new 4GB DDR3 DRAM modules using high-density 2-gi-gabit (2Gbit) DDR3 chips. A 4GB 240-pin DDR3-1333 Long-DIMM for desktops itruns at 1333MHz with latencies of 9-9-9, a 4GB DDR3-1333 SO-DIMM notebookmemory module which operates at 1333MHz with latencies of 9-9-9, and a 4GBDDR3-1066 SO-DIMM that runs at 1066MHz with CL7 timings. Each moduleis optimized for stable 1.5V operation. These modules are made with high den-sity energy-efficient 2Gbit chips, enabling conscientious users to take ad-vantage of the best power-performance ratio available for their desktop orlaptop computer. By the adoption of high capacity 2Gbit DDR3 chipsusing the 40nm-class DRAM manufacturing process, Transcend claimsthat their new DDR3 modules effectively increase a computer`s totalmemory capacity while reducing power consumption and prolongsystem lifetime. All of Transcend’s DDR3 memory modules fullycomply with JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Coun-cil) standards. These 4GB DDR3 DRAMs are built with256Mx8 high-quality DDR3 FBGA chips for their improvedelectrical and heat dissipation characteristics. Price: `̀6800 with Transcend’s lifetime warranty.

Beetel’s new phone TD590comes with 3G compatibility. Ithas a front VGA camera and a3.2MP rear camera. It is a Dual-SIM handset with EDGE and 3Gfor fast downloads. The phonesupports motion sensing and haswidgets for social networkingsites like Facebook, Nimbuzzand Yahoo. Additional entertain-ment options include StereoBluetooth playback, FM Radiowith recording and java compat-ibility. TD 590 supports all high-resolution video formats with theuser-interface having animatedeffects while navigating. Alongwith this a high-end chipset fromMediaTek, which Beetel claimsto be the best chipset available inthe market, lies at the heart of allthe functions of the TD590. Price: `̀6999.

Dell’s android run tablet Streak arrives in India. It sportsa five inch capacitive multi-touch WVGA display and An-droid 1.6 mobile OS. The tablet is powered by Qual-comm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor; this makes it thefirst in the world to use the processor. Streak has a 5MPcamera with LED flash and a VGA front facing camerafor video calls. In terms of memory it comes with a 512MB ROM, 512 MB SDRAM, 2 GB non-user accessibleMicro SD for system and applications files only. It hasWi-Fi, 3G HSUPA and Bluetooth, for connectivity. Inte-grated social media apps like Twitter, Facebook, andYouTube also comes with the tablet. Dell India has tied upwith Tata DOCOMO and will provide postpaid users withfree 500mb data usage every month for a period of sixmonths. Price: `̀ 34,990

DDeellll SSttrreeaakk CCoommeess ttoo IInnddiiaa

Kobian introduced their new Mercury IXA 480U subwoofer speaker system, which they promise, with its clearsound, will be a delight for music, games and movie enthu-siasts. The stylishly designed wooden base has a 5.25 inchlong throw driver, and its speaker delivers an output powerof 10W RMS Power with low distortion. This new subwoofer system’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it supportsUSB drive or SD card which is a rare treat for music lovers.It can effortlessly comply with desktop and TV for optimalperformance. Its exterior is attributed with a sleek black andsilver design which makes it an eye candy. Price: `̀1980.

TECH PRODUCTSBy Hari Anil

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birds. After returning to the monastery,he fell asleep for a few hours. Suddenly,he was jostled and awakened in the mid-dle of the night by his fellow monk.“How could you carry that woman?”cried out the agitated monk and contin-ued his harsh language. “What woman?”the sleepy monk enquired. “Don’t youremember? That women you carriedacross the stream?” his colleaguesnapped. “Oh, her,” laughed the sleepymonk. “I only carried her across thestream. You seem to have carried her allthe way back to the monastery.”

The key question to reflect on is: arewe unduly obsessed with our past? – andthis includes our successes and failuresin the past. Past has both its lessons andlimitations. Future holds possibilities andopportunities. Future, no doubt, is uncer-tain and can be very intimidating. How-ever, for the prepared it can also be veryrewarding. What behaviors differentiatethe future-focused managers? How canwe become one and craft a future of ourchoice? I will share some perspectives inthe following paragraphs.� Entrepreneurial Mindset: Those

managers with an entrepreneurialmindset make the best use of the cur-rent possibilities and future opportu-nities. Given the increasingcomplexities in the business land-scape, those with this mindset usethe uncertainty to their benefit andleverage it for growth rather thanlament it. This mindset is marked byspeed and confidence. Those withthis mindset also are passionate inseeking new opportunities and rec-ognize them even as they appear inthe horizon. Contrary to popular be-lief, those with an entrepreneurialmindset are actually very highly dis-ciplined. They often maintain an in-ventory of unexploited opportunitiesand revisit this inventory of ideasfrom time to time. Their disciplinealso shows in that they pursue onlythe very best opportunities and donot go after anything and everything.And such a mindset also makes them

very good at what is known as‘adaptive execution.’ Both thewords are important. They executewith a missionary zeal and are alsoadaptive – able to change directionas the real opportunity evolves. Fi-nally, those with an entrepreneurialmindset engage the energies ofeveryone in their chosen area of pur-suit. They engage people both inside

and outside. They build and nurturea network of relationships ratherthan going it alone, making the mostof intellectual and other resourcespeople have to offer.

� They are very vigilant all the time:Those who make the best of oppor-tunities show a heightened state ofawareness, characterized by greatcuriosity, alertness and willingnessto “satisfice”- a term coined by theNobel Prize winning economist DrHerbert Simon to refer to the deci-sion making strategy involving in-complete information. Succeedingin a “Butterfly” environment wherestrategic inflection points occur allthe time in the business environ-ment, being vigilant becomes a keysuccess factor for grabbing the pos-sibilities and opportunities. Some ofthe characteristics of vigilant leadersare: (a) focus externally and stayopen to diverse perspectives; (b)apply strategic foresight and probedeeply for second-order effects; and(c) encourage others to explorewidely by creating a culture of dis-covery. GE’s Jack Welch describesin his best-selling book, “Winning”,the following as the traits of growthleaders: (1) creates focus that definessuccess in the market; (2) Clearthinker who can simplify strategyinto specific actions; (3) has theimagination and courage to take

risks on both people and ideas; (4)can energize teams through inclu-siveness and connection with peo-ple; and (5) develop expertise in afunction or domain.

� They are very optimistic:Makingthe best of possibilities and opportu-nities demands a high dose of realis-tic optimism even in the face ofseemingly difficult business climate.

Dr Martin Seligman, the proponentof positive psychology makes acase that success in life and careerdemands more of OQ (OptimismQuotient) than IQ (Intelligencequotient). Author of best -sellingbook, “Outliers”, Malcom Glad-well again makes a powerful casethat IQ beyond a threshold of say115 or so is not a great differentia-tor. Dr. Warren Bennis who dedi-cated all his life for researching andreporting on the field of leadershipcoined a term “Wallenda Factor” todescribe the impact of one’s per-ception of the outcome of an eventor effort. When the perception ispositive, the outcome tends to bepositive. Optimism plays a vitalrole in this. In his study, all the suc-cessful leaders demonstrated a highoptimism and never once used theterm ‘fail’ or ‘failure’ in their con-versation with him.

Everyone can make it:Making the bestof possibilities and opportunities requiresall the three characteristics describedabove. And these attributes are not some-thing we must be born with. These canbe cultivated as a mindset and behavioursand overtime, they become our habits. AsWilliam James, the American Philoso-pher quoted at the beginning said: “Youcan change your life by changing yourexperience!”

&& Focusing on

OOppppoorrttuunniittiieessPPoossssiibbiilliittiieess When you watch highly successful

managers, you will notice a dis-tinct characteristic. They are veryfocused on the possibilities andopportunities, more than obsessed

or bogged down with the past. They stand testimonyto the old adage: “Understand the past; and then let itgo!” While it is important to remember the lessonsfrom the past, future is going to be very different andtherefore possibilities and opportunities need maxi-mum attention. American philosopher William Jamessaid that you could change your life by changing yourexperience. For example, you do not sing because youare happy; you are happy because you sing! AlbertEinstein, Thomas Edison, Steven Spielberg and suchother creative people we all can relate to, unlockedtheir power by remaining open to possibilities and op-portunities. While rear view mirror serves an impor-tant purpose while driving on a freeway, you do notmake great strides by looking into it all the time. Anoccasional glance is not only helpful but is often nec-essary. But an obsession with the rear view mirror cancome in the way of pressing ahead.

Baggage of the past: Too much of living in the pastis no road map to succeeding in the future. It can ac-tually drain a lot of energy and block our making thebest of the future. Here is a nice story I came acrossthat captures the spirit of the emotional baggage thatmany of us tend to carry from the past instead of chan-neling our energies into the future.

The Monks and the Young Woman:Two monks were strolling by a stream on their wayback to their monastery. They were startled by thesound of a young woman in a bridal gown, cryingsoftly. She needs to cross to get to her wedding butwas worried that crossing the stream might ruin herbeautiful handmade gown. In their particular sect,monks were prohibited from touching women. Butone monk was filled with compassion for the brideand went ahead with helping the woman cross byhoisting her on his shoulders. She smiled and bowedwith gratitude even as the monk splashed his way backto rejoin his companion. The second monk was lividand started to scold all the way back. The offendingmonk did not react, but simply listened to the singing

The author is Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer, Symphony Services.He can be reached at [email protected]

PEOPLE MANAGER By C. Mahalingam

While it is important to remember the lessons from the past, future is going to be very different and therefore possibilities andopportunities need maximum attention.


The choice on how best toconsume software —whether on-premises orthrough a Software as aService (SaaS) model —

is based on your specific requirementsat different points in your business andorganizational lifecycles. Each modelpresents benefits that take into consid-eration the IT skills available withinyour organization and your budget forcapital versus operational expenses.When you look at each model, it isalso important to consider the poten-tial for growth in your IT infrastruc-ture and the level of customization andintegration required.

The Right ApproachChoosing a SaaS delivery model for ITservice management can provide yourIT organization with many benefits.Leaving the IT service managementinfrastructure to a SaaS vendor avoidsthe upfront costs of purchasing andimplementing the software, the capitalexpense of buying hardware, and thecosts associated with compliance andsecurity best practices.

However, even after having chosen

to adopt a SaaS model, you still needto decide ‘how much’ IT service man-agement you need. Do you need a tac-tically focused, slimmed-downhelpdesk application focused on basicworkflow for incident managementand asset stores? Or do you need amore full-featured system that pro-vides detailed information about the ITinfrastructure and best-practice ITworkflows?

Choosing the right IT service man-agement approach is critical because itwill help determine not only your ITcosts, but also your business agility foryears to come. Here are the criteriathat have helped IT organizations likeyours choose the right level of a SaaS-based IT service management plat-form.

Key CriteriaThe size of your user base, along with

your staff size and associated skill lev-els, can provide important clues aboutthe range and complexity of your en-vironment. We have found that IT or-ganizations generally employ onehelpdesk professional for every 100users, and that those organizationswith a maximum of 35 helpdesk pro-fessionals are generally candidates fora smaller, slimmed-down offering.Firms with more than 35 helpdesk pro-

fessionals, on the other hand, tend tohave more demanding requirementsthat call for higher-end IT servicemanagement systems as well as askilled staff to implement them effec-tively.

Other considerations might bemore important than size, however.One is the current and future com-plexity of your application environ-ment and the IT infrastructure thatsupports it. If your applications — as

well as the servers, storage, and net-works that support them — are rea-sonably simple and static, you couldconsider a more basic solution to holddown cost and complexity. The greaterthe complexity the more you shouldconsider a comprehensive solution.

Another factor to consider is howthe solution will help you deliver ITservices more quickly and at lowercost. If you have a very complex envi-ronment, the automation and manage-ment provided by a comprehensivesolution might actually reduce the costand time required to provide suchservices, even though the solution mayappear to be more expensive than amore basic alternative. If your envi-ronment is less complex, a basic solu-tion may be a better way to get thatagility and savings. A comprehensiveIT service management solution pro-vides more information and enablesmore processes.

If managing ‘what you do’ is be-coming as important, or more impor-tant, than ‘what you have’, you shouldalso consider a comprehensive ITservice management platform. Basicsystems usually provide only an asset

inventory application, rather than anasset management system that uses aconfiguration management database(CMDB) to catalog information aboutyour IT assets.

The CMDB found in comprehen-sive systems not only stores asset data,but also normalizes and shares it withan entire range of IT service manage-ment tools. An enterprise-scale CMDBimproves the speed and accuracy ofhelpdesk services, while also support-ing more mature, enterprise-wide

change and release processes. In addi-tion, an enterprise-level CMDB easesasset and software license manage-ment activities, ranging from provid-ing software to users to retiringunneeded software.IntegrationThe ability to integrate other systems— such as infrastructure discovery,event management, or business appli-cations — into your IT service man-agement platform is usually foundonly in more comprehensive solutions.While most basic systems ship withintegration to authentication mecha-nisms, such as LDAP, you should con-sider a broader solution if you needintegration with infrastructure discov-ery, event management, or such busi-ness applications as ERP or CRMsystems.

With broad integration needscomes the requirement for infrastruc-ture discovery tools that enable track-ing of IT components, such as servers,network switches, and storage arraysthrough their service lifecycles. Bytracking the IT service componentsthat provide critical business services,you are better able to make the deci-

The author is Vice President and General Manager, SaaS Business,BMC Software and Christopher Williams, Lead Service SupportSolutions Manager, BMC Software

TECHNOLOGY By Bob Johnson

SaaS-BasedHow to Choose a

IT Service Management Solution

Even after having chosen to adopt a SaaSmodel, you still need to decide ‘how much’IT service management you need

Choosing the right ITservice managementapproach is criticalbecause it helps determine not onlyyour IT costs, butalso your businessagility for years tocome


sions required to resolve service slow-downs or interruptions, or to meet in-dustry, corporate, or legally mandatedcompliance and governance standards.

Change Management and ServiceLevel ManagementComprehensive IT service manage-ment solutions tend to provide higherlevels of support, as well as more ma-ture processes around change manage-ment and service level management.You should give greater considerationto change management the more youare experiencing serious problems im-plementing changes or security up-dates within your normal maintenancewindows. You should also make it avery high priority if you have experi-enced slowdowns or crashes becauseof changes made in error or in thewrong order, or if the problems arecaused by ‘collisions’ among multiplereleases.

Moving to a broader IT servicemanagement solution with maturechange management processes mightalso help you reduce costs and errorsby grouping configuration changes orby changing the order in which theyare done. Service level managementcapabilities found in comprehensiveIT service management solutions maybe worthwhile if your business re-quires interactions among multipleapplications and IT infrastructurecomponents, or if you need to providedifferent levels of service to variousclasses of users. Other considerationsinclude whether you must meet spe-cific SLAs for users in different busi-ness units or divisions, and whetherthe business measures IT on its abilityto provide business services (such as

decision support for a manufacturingsystem or policy underwriting) ratherthan just applications and networkuptime.

Release Management and DataCenter AutomationThe more you need mature releasemanagement capabilities and datacenter automation, the more youshould consider a comprehensive ITservice management solution. Youshould give more consideration to re-lease management to the extent thatyou have experienced problems im-plementing new application releaseswithin your normal maintenance win-dows or have experienced applicationoutages or slowdowns due to soft-ware that was released in error or re-leased in the wrong order. Thestreamlined release management pro-vided by a robust IT service manage-ment tool can help free your IT staff

from routine work to develop newmission-critical applications or serv-ices.

Data center automation may be arequirement if your internal IT groupis having trouble matching the pricesthat cloud service providers are quot-ing for IT services. It may also be arequirement if your IT staff is beingpulled away from strategic, business-critical projects to ‘keep the lights on’or deal with operational emergencies.Finally, this may also be a require-ment if the management is consider-ing outsourcing part or all of your IToperation to save money.

The On-Premises OptionWhile there are many benefits to de-ploying IT service management

through a SaaS model, there are othercases where on-premises deploymentmay be the best option. On-premisesdeployment is required, of course, ifyour organization must comply withgovernment, industry, or corporateguidelines that forbid corporate dataor systems being hosted outside theenterprise firewall. It may also be thebest option when senior business orIT management staff are, for what-ever reason, fundamentally opposedto moving critical systems to ‘thecloud’.

On-premises deployment may bea better fit the more you need to cus-tomize the code (as opposed to justreconfiguring the system settings) orintegrate it with locally hosted appli-cations. You should consider on-premises deployment if you havesignificant concerns about the relia-bility or speed of the Internet accessavailable to your enterprise.

In summary, there is a variety ofIT service management choices avail-able to you. If you choose the SaaSdelivery option, consider looking foran ITIL-based helpdesk that meetsthe needs of organizations withsmaller or less complex require-ments. An on-demand option, how-ever, can provide a SaaS-based ITservice management solution for or-ganizations that need more extensivecapabilities in such areas as incident,problem, and change management, aswell as integration with other appli-cations. Alternatively, if you chooseto go on-premises, consider whetheryou need essential service desk capa-bilities, or a full-featured IT servicemanagement solution.

As you consider your current andfuture requirements, look for a ven-dor that provides the flexibility tomove your deployment between thecloud and on-premises as needed.This allows you to protect your in-vestment, while also providing theflexibility to adapt as your businessrequirements change.

You should consider on-premises deployment if you have significant concernsabout the reliability or speed of the Internetaccess available to your enterprise

Regn. No. KRNA/BGE-1046/08-10 RNI REG.NO. KARENG/2006/16955

smarttechie nov 10 issue

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