track technology build business shape self jack-up -...
TRANSCRIPT
Tr ac k Te c h n o lo gy B u i ld B u s i n e s s s hap e s e lf
Volume 02 | Issue 15
Ho
w t
o S
olv
e Y
ou
r t
ou
gH
eS
t C
Ha
ll
en
ge
| Ma
kin
g C
ol
la
bo
ra
tio
n a
nd
So
Cia
l S
YS
te
MS
wo
rk
Volume 02
Issue 15
November 07 2013150
next HorizonS Turning Ideas Into
Innovations Pg 32
beSt of breed
Picking Your Successor Pg 16
viewpoint
Software Defined = Everything is a Server Pg 44
cio
& l
ea
de
r.c
om
A 9.9 Media Publication
15
Jack-up TechnologyThe growth in the telecom sector seems to be plateauing. There is an opportunity for CIOs to leverageIT for jacking-up flagging growth and fading revenues. PAGE 22
IBM Amazon
1November 07 2013
editorialyashvendra singh | [email protected]
Missed Call?Margins are getting
squeezed in the telecom sector. It is time
CIOs leveraged IT for renewed growth
Global Head of Research, Gart-ner, at the recently concluded Gartner Symposium in Goa. He said, “The digital world is here and this results in every budget being an IT budget; every com-pany being a technology com-pany; every business is becom-ing a digital leader; and every person is becoming a technology company. This is resulting in the beginning of an era: the Digital Industrial Economy. The Digital Industrial Economy will be built on the foundations of the Nexus of Forces (which includes a con-fluence and integration of cloud, social collaboration, mobile and information) and the Internet of Everything by combining the physical world and the virtual.”
We look forward to your feedback.
There are few sectors in India that have witnessed
such tremendous growth as the telecom sector. Over the last decade, declining tariffs and increasing network cover-age have pushed growth at an astounding pace. With a sub-scriber base of about 900 mil-lion, India today ranks next only to China in terms of the total number of subscribers.
The next year too looks good for the sector. According to Gartner, IT spending in India is projected to total $71.3 billion in 2014, a 5.9 percent increase from the $67.4 billion forecast
$11.2 billion in 2014. Software will account for $4.1 billion in revenue, Gartner believes.
While there is still growth, the going is certainly not as good as it was earlier. Tariff wars, intense competition, consum-ers demanding more for less, falling ARPUs, and the need to maximise utilisation of scarce spectrum are all putting pres-sure on margins.
The scenario offers an oppor-tunity for technology decision-makers in the telecom industry. Accustomed to delivering more with less, CIOs are best positioned to understand the current situation. It is now up to them to leverage IT and boost growth of their companies.
This issue’s cover story gives a peek into what some of the top telecom CIOs are doing with technology and with what results.
I will leave you with an inter-esting observation made by Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP and
for 2013. IT services will record the strongest revenue growth at 12.1 percent.
The telecom services mar-ket which includes fixed and mobile, data and voice services will continue to be the largest IT segment in India with IT spend-ing forecast to reach $30 billion in 2014. The devices market, which includes mobile phones, PCs, tablets and printers is expected to total $23.5 billion in 2014, a 6 percent increase from 2013. IT services will record the fastest growth amongst the vari-ous segments, and it is project-ed to grow 13 percent to reach
editors pickJack-Up Technology The growth in the telecom sector seems to be plateauing. There is an opportunity for CIOs to leverage IT for jacking-up flagging growth and fading revenues
22
2 November 07 2013
Cover Story 22 | Jack-up TechnologyThe growth in the telecom sector seems to be plateauing. There is an opportunity for CIOs to leverage IT for jacking-up flagging growth and fading revenues
COpyrIghT, All rights reserved: reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive pvt Ltd. is prohibited. printed and published by Anuradha Das Mathur for Nine Dot Nine Interactive pvt Ltd, Bungalow No. 725, Sector - 1, Shirvane, Nerul, Navi Mumbai - 400706. printed at Tara Art printers pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.p.) 201301
Please Recycle This Magazine And Remove Inserts Before Recycling
regulArS01 | Editorial08 | EntErprisE
roundup44 | viEwpoint
22
November 2013
Cover Design by Manav Sachdev
Tr ac k Te c h n o lo gy B u i ld B u s i n e s s s hap e s e lf
Volume 02 | Issue 15
Ho
w t
o S
olv
e Y
ou
r t
ou
gH
eS
t C
Ha
ll
en
ge
| Ma
kin
g C
ol
la
bo
ra
tio
n a
nd
So
Cia
l S
YS
te
MS
wo
rk
Volume 02
Issue 15
November 07 2013150
next HorizonS Turning Ideas Into
Innovations Pg 32
beSt of breed
Picking Your Successor Pg 16
viewpoint
Software Defined = Everything is a Server Pg 44
cio
& l
ea
de
r.c
om
A 9.9 Media Publication
15
Jack-up TechnologyThe growth in the telecom sector seems to be plateauing. There is an opportunity for CIOs to leverageIT for jacking-up flagging growth and fading revenues. PAGE 22
3November 07 2013
A QueStioN of ANSwerS12 | “We provide better control of networks” Nathan Bell, Marketing, products and pricing Director, Telstra global, on advanced telecom solutions
12
www.cioandleader.com
advertisers’ index
IBM IFCKonika Mino 5Sanovi 7SAS Institute 15Smartlink IBCLenovo BC
This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.
16 | BEst of BrEEd: Picking Your Suc-ceSSor For CIOs who aspire to excellence, suc-cession planning is one of the responsibilities that come with the job
38 | tEch for govErnancE: A renAiSSAnce in the MAnufActur-ing Sector CISOs are waking up to many risks which are potentially huge
32 | nExt hori-zons: turning ideAS into innovA-tionS Author Chris Trimble describes three models for executing innovation initiatives
Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj SinhaPrinter & Publisher: Anuradha Das Mathur
EditorialExecutive Editor: Yashvendra SinghConsulting Editor: Atanu Kumar Das
Correspondent: Debashis SarkardEsign
Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K NarayananSr. Art Director: Anil VK
Associate Art Director: Anil TSr. Visualisers: Manav Sachdev, Shokeen Saifi & Sristi Maurya
Visualiser: NV BaijuSr. Designers: Shigil Narayanan, Haridas Balan
& Manoj Kumar VPDesigners: Charu Dwivedi, Peterson PJ
Pradeep G Nair, Dinesh Devgan & Vikas Sharma MARCOM
Designer: Rahul BabuSTUDIO
Chief Photographer: Subhojit PaulSr. Photographer: Jiten Gandhi
advisory PanElAnil Garg, CIO, Dabur
David Briskman, CIO, RanbaxyMani Mulki, VP-IT, ICICI Bank
Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo
Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of IndiaS R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL
Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla GroupSushil Prakash, Sr Consultant, NMEICT (National Mission on
Education through Information and Communication Technology)Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorpVishal Salvi, CISO, HDFC Bank
Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay
nEXt100 advisory PanElManish Pal, Deputy Vice President, Information Security Group
(ISG), HDFC Bank Shiju George, Sr Manager (IT Infrastructure), Shoppers Stop Farhan Khan, Associate Vice President – IT, Radico Khaitan
Berjes Eric Shroff, Senior Manager – IT, Tata ServicesSharat M Airani, Chief – IT (Systems & Security), Forbes Marshall
Ashish Khanna, Corporate Manager, IT Infrastructure, The Oberoi Group
salEs & markEtingNational Manager – Events and Special Projects:
Mahantesh Godi (+91 98804 36623)National Sales Manager: Vinodh K (+91 97407 14817)
Assistant General Manager Sales (South):Ashish Kumar Singh (+91 97407 61921)
Brand & EvEntsBrand Manager: Jigyasa Kishore (+91 98107 70298)
Product Manager-CSO Forum: Astha Nagrath (+91 99020 93002)Manager: Sharath Kumar (+91 84529 49090)
Assistant Manager: Rajat Ahluwalia (+91 98998 90049)Assistant Brand Managers: Nupur Chauhan (+91 98713 12202)
Vinay Vashistha (+91 99102 34345)Assistant Manager – Corporate Initiatives (Events):
Deepika Sharma Associate – Corporate Initiatives (Events): Naveen Kumar
Production & logisticsSr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath
Manager Operations: Rakesh Upadhyay Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar
Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh & Mohd. Ansari
oFFicE addrEssPublished, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt
Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Anuradha Das Mathur. Published at Bungalow No. 725, Sector - 1, Shirvane,
Nerul, Navi Mumbai - 400706. Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt Ltd.A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301
For any customer queries and assistance please contact [email protected]
4 November 07 2013
Innovating to SucceedAlways stay ahead of competition by using IT effectively
currenTchAllenge
To regularly develop in-house applicaTions To reduce cosTs
We were facing a situation where we needed to come with an application/solution that helps journalists to file stories from whereever they are. This meant that the IT team needed to act fast. Last year, we took up this project and developed an application that allows journalists to file stories from anywhere they are. They can file it over the internet using their hand-held device, laptop or desktop. One of the most important aspects of this application are its security features. All the necessary security parameters have been built-in into the system. It ensures effective col-laboration between regional bureaus to serve the subscribers better.
The advantage of this project was that it ensured that PTI stays ahead of the competition by report-ing stories on-time.
Moreover, it helped the organisa-tion to reduce costs by a huge margin because now there were no annual maintenance costs that the company needed to pay as it was an in- house application.
After the solution was developed, it improved the agility and ensured all the business processes were in sync. With no involvement of the third-party, this project turned out to be one of the best innovations done by the IT team at PTI. The challenge for us now is to live up to the expectation and keep on developing in-house applications.
It has been more than a year now since the project was launched and it is turning out to be the best innovation by the IT department in the organisation.
We are trying to add-in more fea-tures to the project to help journalists have an application that is user-friendly and with latest features.
As a CIO, it is very important to understand the demands of the users and develop products according to their needs.
— As told to Atanu Kumar Das
I have always believed in running IT as a profit centre and for this we have innovated a lot. As a news agency, it is imperative to file stories as and when they happen. At Press Trust of India we have reporters/correspondents all over the country and abroad and their sole mission is to file the story at the earliest. There are certain constraints in doing so because every time one cannot be in office and file the story.
I BelIeve The auThor has over 20 years of experience in managing IT at various large
organisations like The Indian Express and IMRB.
By TrIdIB BordoloI, CIO, PTI
LETTERS
WRITE TO US: CIO&Leader values your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and how
to make it a better read for you. Our endeavour continues to be work in progress and your comments will go a long way in making it the preferred publication of the CIO Community.
Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to [email protected]
“Leaders shouLd motivate the team”
The ingredients that make a CIO a leader a vision to see beyond the ordinary. To read the full story go to: http://www.cioandleader.com/cioleaders/features/10280/-leaders-motivate-team
CIO&LEADER. COM Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO, Hero Motocorp, talks about different stances organisations should take to counter web securityhttp://www.cioandleader.com/cioleaders/features/15061/enterprises-focus-app-security
OpiniOn
Anuj GArG, TechnicAl DirecTor, zync GlobAl
Anuj Garg, Technical Director, Zync Global, shares his views on leadership
Volume 02 | Issue 14
WH
AT
CIO
S C
AN
LE
AR
N F
RO
M U
S G
OV
T. SH
UT
DO
WN
| CIA
DIR
EC
TO
R W
AR
NS
OF
‘CY
BE
R-P
EA
RL
HA
RB
OU
R’
Volume 02Issue 14
October 21 2013150
NEXT HORIZONS How to Lead Like Red Burns Pg 38
BEST OF BREED
Unlocking Your Firm’s Innovation Potential Pg 10
VIEWPOINTDesktops-as-a-Service Pg 52
TR AC K TE C H N O LO GY B U I LD B U S I N E S S S HAP E S E LF
S P I N E
CIO
& L
EA
DE
R.C
OM
A 9.9 Media Publication
14
"I have alwaysleveraged ITfor businesstransformation" MUKUND PRASADDIRECTOR-GROUP HR, BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
& GROUP CIO, WELSPUN GROUP OF COMPANIES
ARE CTOS MORE InTERESTED In SATISfyInG ThE CfO & BOARD RAThER ThAn ThE COnSUMER?
If CTO is aligned to the CFO and the Board in that order, he will also have to be good at resume writing because he will not last too long. But then the question that arises is whether the CFO is aligned to the consumer or not? If he is not, then he may be in hot water sooner than later.arun gupta, CIO, Cipla
CIO&Leader LinkedIn GroupJoin over 900 CIOs on the CIO&Leader LinkedIn
group for latest news and hot enterprise technology
discussions. Share your thoughts, participate in
discussions and win prizes for the most valuable
contribution. You can join The CIO&Leader group at:
www.linkedin.com/
groups?mostPopular=&gid=2580450
Some of the hot discussions on the group are:Virtual CTO/CIO
A long term IT partner for your business growth
This is a model that SMBs are slowly waking up to.
While their IT head can chip away with his day-to-day
activities, an external help (a part time CIO) can give their
IT a proper direction and can review performance to
ensure the company's objectives are met.
—Balasubramanian S R Business & IT Consultant
6 November 07 2013
8 November 07 2013
story InsIde
Cloud Will Become the
Bulk of New IT Spend by 2016
Pg 10
million Will be the size of global video game market in 2013
Infy To Be Fined $35 Mn For Visa Fraud the Us goverenment has accused Infosys of putting its employees on visitor visas
The US Department of Homeland Security and the State Department has accused Indian IT outsourc-ing giant Infosys of putting its employees in US on improper visas, according to the Wall Street Journal. The US government is looking forward to react with a fine of about $35 million in this respect.
The US goverenment has accused Infosys of put-ting its employees on visitor visas rather than work visas while serving big clients like Goldman Sachs Group, Wal-Mart Stores, Cisco Systems among others in America.
“Infosys used easy to get B1 visas, which are meant for short business visits, to bring an unknown num-
ber of its workers to the United States for long-term stays,” according to the report. “Infosys denies and disputes any claims of systemic visa fraud, misuse of visas for competitive advantage or immigration abuse. Those claims are untrue and are assertions that remain unproven,” Infosys said. “There were no criminal charges or court rulings against the com-pany. Furthermore, there are no limitations on the company's eligibility for federal contracts or access to US visa programmes as a result of the settlement.” According to Infosys, only 0.02 percent of the days that Infosys staff worked on US projects last year were performed by people on B-1 visas.
$93 data BrIefIng
EntErprisEround-up
ill
us
tr
at
ion
BY
an
il t
E n t E r p r i s E r o u n d - u p
9November 07 2013
Gartner expects the cloud-based security services market to reach $2.1 billion by the end of the current year. the market continues to show strong growth and is expected to rise to $3.1 billion by 2015.
QUIck Byte on cloUd
HP Brings Community-Sourced Security Platform Will enable automated, real-time collaboration
hP haS announced HP Threat Central, a community-sourced security intelli-gence platform that will enable automated, real-time collaboration between organ-isations to combat advanced cyber threats.
Developed with HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, HP Threat Cen-tral is a collaborative security intelligence platform for community members to share threat data, analysis and mitigations in order to disrupt the adversary faster and prevent successful attacks. Currently being piloted with a qualified group of HP ArcSight customers, the platform will provide participants with real-time intel-ligence on the attack vectors, methods, motivations and specific adversaries behind the threats they face. For example, the banking industry often falls prey to a domi-no attack where one organisation is hit with an attack that is later used against its peers. With HP Threat Central, once a threat is identified, authorized community members are alerted in real time, enabling them to look for similar indicators within their own organisations to get ahead of the adversary. Leveraging the plat-form, community members can submit threat data, analysis and mitigations to which HP will add data and analysis from HP Security Research and partners.
Gates feels that internet connectivity doesn’t mean much if you’re dying of starvation, he told the Financial Times in a rare interview done recently.
— Bill Gates, co-
founder, Microsoft
—Gartner
I certainly love the IT thing. But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.”
THey Said iT
Bill GaTeS
ima
ge
BY
ph
ot
os
.co
mim
ag
e B
Y p
ho
to
s.c
om
E n t E r p r i s E r o u n d - u p
10 November 07 2013
Cloud Will Become the Bulk of IT Spend by 2016 Private cloud is getting a lot of attention among enterprisesThe USe of cloud computing is growing,
and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend, according to Gartner. 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enter-prises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.
Gartner describes cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered “as a service” using Internet technologies. It
heralds an evolution of business in positive and negative ways. It has also become a hot industry term that has been used in many contradictory ways.
“Overall, there are very real trends toward cloud platforms, and also toward massively scalable processing. Virtualisation, service orientation and the Internet have converged to sponsor a phenomenon that enables indi-viduals and businesses to choose how they'll acquire or deliver IT services, with reduced emphasis on the constraints of traditional
IT spending in Asia-Pacific (APAC) is expected to grow 5.5 percent to $767 billion by 2014, research firm Gartner said.
software and hardware licensing models,” said Chris Howard, research vice president at Gartner. “Services delivered through the cloud will foster an economy based on delivery and consumption of everything from storage to computation to video to finance deduction management.” “In India, cloud services revenue is projected to have a five-year projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2 percent from 2012 through 2017 across all segments of the cloud computing market. Segments such as software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) have even higher projected CAGR growth rates of 34.4 percent and 39.8 percent,” said Ed Ander-son, research director at Gartner. “Cloud computing continues to grow at rates much higher than IT spending generally. Growth in cloud services is being driven by new IT computing scenarios being deployed using cloud models, as well as the migration of traditional IT services to cloud service alternatives.” “There is a flawed perception of cloud computing as one large phenom-enon,” said Howard. “Cloud computing is actually a spectrum of things complement-ing one another and building on a founda-tion of sharing. Inherent dualities in the cloud computing phenomenon are spawn-ing divergent strategies for cloud computing success. The public cloud, hybrid clouds, and private clouds now dot the landscape of IT based solutions. Because of that, the basic issues have moved from ‘what is cloud’ to ‘how will cloud projects evolve’.”
Howard further added that private cloud gets a lot of attention and is today the most popular form of cloud across various sec-tors. However, private cloud is not appropri-ate for all services and, while the majority of midsize and large enterprises will deploy private cloud services over the next few years, private cloud will only be used for specific services. As enterprises build their cloud computing strategy, the program should be broken down into two primary IT centric work streams, two supporting IT work streams and a strategic business work stream. The two primary work streams are: the enterprise as a consumer of cloud services, and the enterprise as a provider of cloud services. When the enterprise is a consumer, the focus is on the IT-related capabilities delivered as a service.
gloBal tracker
IT Spending
ima
gin
g:
vik
as
sh
ar
ma
ill
us
tr
at
ion
BY
ph
ot
os
.co
m
E n t E r p r i s E r o u n d - u p
11November 07 2013
Most Firms Can’t Keep Breaches Under Wraps it is a major blow for their business
data CEntErs
Juniper networks has
unveiled metaFabric, a
new architecture for next gen-
eration data centers. this new
architecture enables custom-
ers to run data center net-
works securely and efficiently.
customers can integrate
a broad array of hardware
and software solutions from
Juniper networks or other
networking vendors with the
assurance of interoperability
and minimal disruption.
Based on open interfaces,
metaFabric integrates with
any heterogeneous data cen-
ter environment without fear of
vendor lock-in. With a simpli-
fied approach, customers can
deploy, operate and manage
data center networks without
application-impacting ser-
vice interruption, resulting in
reduced operating expenses.
using built-in intelligence and
analytics, customers benefit
from a flexible and adaptable
data center network that accel-
erates the adoption of cloud,
mobile and big data applica-
tions, protecting investments
as business needs evolve.
to ensure full interoperability
and seamless integration via
multiple deployment options,
metaFabric encompasses new
and existing switching, routing,
sDn and security offerings,
including Juniper’s full suite of
security solutions.
The overwhelmIng majority
of companies facing it security
incidents were unable to keep
information about those incidents
confidential due to pressure
from third parties. this ultimately
led to major blows to business
reputations, according to B2B
international, which worked with
kaspersky lab this spring to
The IncreaSIng business demands on IT mean that data center managers must plan to increase their organisation’s computing and storage capac-ity at a considerable rate in the coming years, according to Gartner, Inc. Organisations that plan well can adjust to rapid growth in computing capacity without requiring more data center floor space, cooling or power and realize a substantial competitive advantage over their rivals.
“The first mistake many data center manag-ers make is to base their estimates on what they
Companies Should Plan for infinite data Centre firms that plan well can adjust to rapid growth in computing
fact tIcker
conduct the global corporate
it security risks 2013 survey
among business representatives
around the world.
public disclosure of information
about it security incidents is often
inevitable, something that most
organizations can’t avoid. the
study revealed that an average
of 44 percent of companies that
suffer a data leakage are forced
to disclose the incident to clients
who might potentially be affected
by the incident, while 34 percent
informed their business part-
ners, 33 percent informed their
suppliers, 27 percent reported to
regulators, and 15 percent were
obliged to disclose details to the
media. large companies are more
frequently faced with having to
disclose details about it security
incidents to third parties. these
organisations must primarily
report to regulators, clients, and
the media.
already have, extrapolating out future space needs according to historical growth patterns,” said David Cappuccio, research vice president at Gart-ner. “This seemingly logical approach is based on two flawed assumptions: that the existing floor space is already being used properly and usable space is purely horizontal.”
To ensure maximum efficiency, data center growth and capacity should be viewed in terms of computing capacity per square foot, or per kilo-watt, rather than a simple measure of floor space. A fairly typical small data center of 40 server racks at 60 percent capacity, housing 520 physical serv-ers and growing in computing capacity at 15 per-cent each year, would require four times as much floor space in 10 years.
“With conventional thinking and the fear of hot spots at the fore, these 40 racks, or 1,200 square feet of floor space, become nearly 5,000 square feet in just 10 years, with associated costs,” said Cappuccio.
“A data center manager who rethinks his organ-isation’s floor plans, cooling and server refreshes can house the increased computing capacity in the original floor space, and help meet growing business needs indefinitely. We will witness small data center environments with significant com-puting growth rates maintaining exactly the same footprint for the next 15 to 20 years.”
In this scenario, Gartner recommends upgrad-ing the existing server base to thinner 1U (one unit) height servers or even sleeveless servers, while increasing rack capacity to 90 percent on average by using innovative floor-size designs and modern cooling methods, such as rear door heat exchanger cooling (RDHx), to mitigate concerns over hot spots.
ill
us
tr
at
ion
BY
ph
ot
os
.co
m
NathaN Bell | TelsTra global
“We provide better control of networks”
In an interaction with Atanu Kumar Das, Nathan Bell, Marketing, Products and Pricing Director, Telstra Global, shares his views on advanced telecom solutions
You have recently started your operations directly in
India? How do you view the tele-com market in the country?Telstra recently announced that it now has the ability to provide end-to-end network solutions to Indian cus-tomers, bolstering its network cover-age and investment in India. The new network would enable Telstra to offer what it believed was one of the most reliable services in the country, as well as providing businesses in India with broader access to Telstra’s suite of advanced telecommuni-cations solutions. Following the Department of Telecommunications – Government of India’s approval of Telstra’s international gateways installed at Mumbai and Chennai, Telstra will now offer International
Private Line (IPL), Ethernet Private Line (EPL) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) services from India. With customers increasingly seeking to manage business-critical aspects of their business from India, the network has never been more important. Telstra’s network is built on state-of-the-art platforms offer-ing high resilience, meaning we are able to offer one of the most reliable services in the country. The launch of our transmission services in India will ensure our current and potential customers have better control of the network, access to more cost–effec-tive services and have less lead time.
The network services will feature mesh network architecture, with Points-of-Presence (PoPs) in Mum-bai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore,
Hyderabad and virtual PoPs in Pune and Kolkata. Both Mumbai and Chennai will act as dual international gateways out of India. This invest-ment into India is part of Telstra’s commitment to offering our custom-ers more diverse international net-work connectivity to meet their evolv-ing business requirements. Telstra was granted ILD (International Long Distance), NLD (National Long Dis-tance) and ISP (Internet Service Pro-vider) licenses in October 2011 and successfully launched Global IPVPN Services in India in March 2012.
The two key new product lines available to customers in India are IPL and EPL services. The IPL service provides dedicated point-to-point links between two key business locations, ensuring security and reli-
12 November 07 2013
A Q u e s t i o n o f A n s w e r s | n A t h A n b e l l
Growth Path: Both Mumbai and Chennai will act as dual international
gateways out of India
13November 07 2013
ability of voice, video and data com-munications. Telstra Global’s IPL offering enables customers to control and manage their own networking routing, protocols and security. There is a wide range of bandwidth options available for this service. Whereas, This Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) certified global EPL service enables customers to expand their networks in small and cost-effective incre-ments. Delivered over Telstra’s cable infrastructure using SDH technol-ogy, the global EPL service operates at the OSI model layer 2, enabling customers to retain control of their own networking routing and to man-age their own security.
Can you throw some more light on your other product
offerings?A dedicated and secure service Tel-stra Global’s Ethernet Private Line (EPL) service is ideal for companies that require either dedicated band-width or greater data privacy, or indeed both. The service operates at the Open Systems Interconnec-tion (OSI) model layer 2 and, as a result, it gives companies the ability to control their network routing and manage their own security. EPL is delivered over Telstra Global’s exten-sive cable assets using Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) technology and can be set up in point-to-point or point-to-multipoint configurations, with a variety of protection/ restora-tion options. Also intelligent network MEF-compliant Network Interface Devices (NIDs) are installed on your sites as standard enabling end-to-end support, diagnostics and perfor-mance reporting.
With EPL, customers have confi-dence that the bandwidth they need is reserved specifically for their own use. Over time, as their needs change, it is easy for them to expand their capacity, in small and afford-able increments, and build their total capacity to as much as 10 Gbps. The scalability offered by this service enables growing organisations to
buy inexpensive Ethernet equipment for their Wide Area Network (WAN) or re-use their existing Ethernet equipment. In addition, Ethernet local access is often more cost effec-tive than many other WAN technolo-gies, contributing to a lower total cost of ownership.
How is Telstra making con-nectivity simple to access
across networks?Secure links between offices Telstra Global IPL’s are ideal for companies that require dedicated bandwidth and greater data security. Telstra Global IPL’s provide organisations with the ability to control and manage their own network routing, protocols and security. Delivered using Syn-chronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) infrastructure, IPL’s can be config-ured to ensure fault tolerance and service restoration, designed to provide service availability in abnor-mal situations.
expand their network gradually and only pay for the capacity they need. What is more, bandwidth increases can be achieved through simple ‘soft upgrades’ with minimal service disruption.
How cost-effective and reli-able are Telstra solutions?
EPL provides support for jumbo frames, which enable better trans-port and bandwidth efficiency. The service is very flexible and can be set up in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. VLAN and protocol transparency means customers can customise and send traffic according to their own business rules.
Customers can also select from a number of different protection/resto-ration options, to gain a high level of service resilience, backed by service level agreements.
Due to the ubiquitous nature of Ethernet, organisations can typically
“this investment into India is part of telstra’s commitment to offering our customers more diverse international network connectivity”
ePl provides
support for
jumbo frames,
which enable
better transport
and bandwidth
efficiency.
telstra’s
network is built
on state-of-the-
art platforms
offering high
resilience
With EPL,
customers have
confidence that
the bandwidth they
need is reserved
specifically for their
own use
things i Believe in
14 November 07 2013
A Q u e s t i o n o f A n s w e r s | n A t h A n b e l l
Best ofBreed
Making Social and Collaboration Systems Work Pg 18
A Geek's Guide to IT Management Pg 20
FeATureS InSIde
Picking Your SuccessorFor CIOs who aspire to excellence, and who may seek
another corner office in the company, succession planning is one of the responsibilities that come with the job By Frank Petersmark
With apologies to Pete Townshend and The Who, the title of one of the British band’s iconic rock albums seems a fitting place to start, and the question to ask, when it comes to CIO succession planning: Who’s next?
Some have referred to succession planning as planning for one’s eventual obso-lescence. It’s not a trivial issue given the importance of technology in nearly every
industry today, which makes it’s all the more curious that most organisations and CIOs give short shrift to succession planning for this critical position. In the past, and this was particularly
ill
us
tr
at
ion
BY
pe
te
rs
on
pj
16 November 07 2013
true of IT, those who ended up in man-agement tended to be those with the best technical skills in whatever discipline or field they specialised in. Such was the case for me as after a technical career as a com-puter operator, applications programmer and systems programmer, I was steadily promoted up the management ranks. That was fine, and it gave me a more empathetic perspective about what it took to implement and manage complex technology initia-tives. However, it did not equip me for the skills required in executive management; I acquired those through sometimes-painful trial and error. None of the skills I gained, however, helped prepare me to think about grooming my successor as, for the most part, I was more concerned about holding on to the job myself. And the last thing I wanted was to give my boss any good options for replacing me. However, once I learned to stop looking over my shoulder and to focus on the organisation’s best inter-ests, I was forced to think in terms of my own career mortality.
It probably helped that my tenure was during the era of the human capital plan-ning frenzy. The one positive thing the human capital frenzy accomplished was to obligate organisations to think about suc-cession planning in a more holistic and enterprise-level manner. On balance, this was good, but it did include the process of ruthlessly rating people’s future potential, and focusing the resources of the organisa-tion on the chosen ones.
Reasons for this difficulty First, unlike other executive positions, the precise definition of what a CIO does is still a moving target. Yes, a CIO is responsible for overall technology strategy, execution, budget, etc., but that’s not all of it. In today’s rapidly changing technology landscape, many CIOs are expected to be the technology prognosticators, somehow magically being able to accu-rately predict the future of tech-nology. On the other end of the spectrum, many CIOs are still viewed as the chief “techie” guy, the one who everybody looks to when a video presentation isn’t working at the board meeting.
The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.
Second, like other C-Suite executives, CIOs are often extremely time-constrained and lack or don’t make the time to develop the next levels of IT leadership. Even if they are blessed with a talented and dependable team of lieutenants, most CIOs find it dif-ficult to carve out the time to focus on the kinds of leadership development that are intrinsic to succession planning.
The third reason, more borne from self-preservation than anything else, is that the CIO position has not been the most stable of executive positions. One need only look at the average tenures of CIOs compared to other executive positions to understand why some CIOs may be reluctant to groom their replacement. After all, once the hand-picked replacement is ready, doesn’t that make the boss expendable? Well, that all depends. If the CIO is perceived as a well-regarded and valuable member of the execu-tive team, then grooming a replacement is considered responsible executive behaviour. However, if that’s not the case, it’s entirely possible that the CIO may not be in a big
hurry to develop his or her potential replacement, regard-less of whether they have the time to do so.
What Can We Do About It?It remains true, however, that CIO succession planning still lags as compared to other exec-utive positions. The question is, what can we do about it?
First and foremost, it is incumbent on any CIO, whether he or she is on firm organisa-tional footing or just hanging by a slender thread, to take an executive and professional approach to succession planning. Beyond that, CIOs owe succession planning, and the accompanying developmental exercises and opportunities, to their direct reports, some of whom may aspire to be a CIO.
Finally, CIOs owe it to themselves. For CIOs who aspire to excellence in their role, and who may even aspire to another corner office in the company, succession planning is one of the many responsibilities that come with the job.
Reflecting on my own experiences, I admit I had some trepidation about suc-cession planning. It wasn’t something that came naturally to me, and it did seem to imply or acknowledge some sort of built-in obsolescence. However, I came to under-stand and realise the importance of succes-sion planning and, more importantly, it pro-vided me with the opportunity to work with some very talented IT people who aspired to higher leadership levels.
In the end, I was the one who gained a lot from the experience, the benefits of which are still with me today.
— Formerly CIO at Amerisure, Frank Peters-mark is CIO Advocate at X by 2, a Farming-ton Hills, Mich.-based technology company specializing in software and data architecture and transformation projects for the insurance industry. — This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioin-sight.com.
$3.1bnWill Be the size of
gloBal cloud-Based security services
market By 2015
“None of the skills I gained, helped prepare me to think about grooming my successor as, for the most part, I was more concerned about holding on to the job myself”
17November 07 2013
m a n a g e m e n t | B e s t o f B r e e d
Making Collaboration & Social Systems WorkSocial and collaboration systems often face challenges when introduced into a company. Here are several strategies for mitigating them By Ajay Deshpande
deployment usually implies introducing a new system into the exist-ing culture of an organisation. Understanding and effectively man-aging this organisational culture is critical to adoption success. More often than not, the culture’s resistance can manifest itself as a change management problem. Indeed, when it comes to social and collabora-tion systems, there are quite a few barriers that hinder adoption.
A lot of enterprise employees, for example, don’t use social col-laboration tools in their personal lives. Driving user adoption among these employees can be particularly challenging. Overcoming this barrier to adoption is not only about helping users learn how to use the new tools, but changing how they perceive the new tools. These employees often think that social platforms like Facebook and Twit-
A successful social software deployment usually implies introducing a new system into the existing culture of a company
in spite of organisations investing in social and collaboration software, the C-Suite continues to face challenges when
it comes to using these sys-tems effectively. While some success stories exist, many organisations are still strug-gling to get the most out of their social and collaboration deployments. In this article, I’ll address the most common implementation challenges, plus several unexpected ones; provide the strategies that the C-Suite needs to mitigate them; and discuss the gover-nance models needed to help ensure the success of your enterprise’s social initiative.
Social and Collaboration Adoption vs. Existing Organisational Culture A successful social software
ill
us
tr
at
ion
BY
pe
te
rs
on
pj
18 November 07 2013
B e s t o f B r e e d | m a n a g e m e n t
ter are a waste of time, and have no idea about how these real-time information platforms can help them do business better. So, for employees who aren’t adept with social media, having a meaningful education component as part of the tool’s introduction into the orga-nization can be even more critical than usage training.
Also, the incentives structure in your organisation may not be conducive to collaboration. While most organisations promote col-laboration in theory, in practice they often have powerful disincen-tives to collaboration already in place. Imagine, for example, a new sales lead comes in to your group and you want to learn who in your organisation has sold to that company. You could use an internal collaboration tool to search for this information. While this sounds ideal in theory, in practice there is no organisational incentive for a salesperson in another location or a different department to help you close a new deal. Often, employees are only rewarded for how they do their jobs, which removes much of the incentive for them to collaborate with others in their organisation.
Companies can use change management techniques to overcome such challenges. As change management experts like to say, “All new initiatives need evangelists.” This is also true for social and collaboration software. In particular, when an employee’s fear (“My manager doesn’t want me to collaborate with people outside of my department”) is one of the barriers to user adoption, choosing appropriate evangelists who can clearly demonstrate the benefits of collaboration for the entire company can be a powerful way to get people on board.
Another method is to assign an executive champion to a new initiative. This has two pluses. First, it demonstrates manage-ment’s commitment to the new initiative. Second, it provides the people who are implementing the new initiative with a powerful ally and resource. Ideally, the executive champion should be a believer in the new initiative, know enough about it to answer rudi-mentary questions, and be a source of guidance during the early stages of adoption.
An incentive plan that supports the new initiative is another useful technique. Such plans require careful consideration in terms of how the success of individuals is mapped to the success of the new initia-tive. Without appropriate mapping, an organisation might find that it is providing incentives for worker behaviour that can jeopardise the new initiative.
Social and Collaboration Governance: Be Aware, Be PreparedWhile change management deals with successfully introducing social or collaborative software into an organisation, governance deals with the issues that might arise from the usage of these tools. Governance means being aware of the issues that might occur, implementing ways to prevent them in the first place, and being able to provide a coordinated, consistent response when they occur. Most of the time, it is difficult to formulate a good response if the organisation’s governance model is taken by surprise. Once an issue arises, what matters most is how management responds and han-dles the situation. Being aware and prepared is half the battle.
Important issues that demand good governance include informa-tion security and privacy-related data leaks. Although technology
provides many ways to protect information, it is still possible that data might fall into the wrong hands. It might be relatively innocu-ous—for example, an ill-timed announcement via Twitter—or a very costly breach of customer privacy. In each of these cases, the system should detect such breaches and the governance model should have policies on how to handle them.
Collaboration channels usually get orphaned in large organisa-tions, and people look at IT as the end-to-end owner of collaboration solutions. While this is true for the technology component, it is usually untrue (and, in fact, unfair) to expect IT groups to handle the “softer” issues, which have legal, financial and customer service-related implications. Senior management must be involved in the policy setting here. A new collaboration environment will, to some degree, impact the way an organisation works and that will impact the bottom line and affect various components of the organisation. Therefore, having clear ownership at the different levels in the col-laboration stack is essential.
Information security needs to be addressed as part of the model’s design in order for it to be most effective. Organisations should think through roles in the company and what access levels are need-ed prior to deployment. Having these issues and scenarios sorted out before a collaboration or social system is implemented will help prevent privacy or compliance fiascos.
Remember: governance is about empowering action, not confin-ing it. A successful governance framework is one that balances the needs for control and security with the employee empowerment that is the essence of enterprise collaboration.
Using effective change management techniques and planning ahead for strong governance will help ensure the success of an enterprise’s social collaboration rollout. Adding an excellent com-munication plan to consistently and constantly get this message out to all users of the system should help meet the technology and business challenges that companies often face when deploying new collaboration systems.
— Ajay Deshpande is chief architect, collaboration solutions, at Per-sistent Systems, a global software product development and technology services company.
— This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioinsight.com.
Important issues that demand good governance include information security and privacy-related data leaks
19November 07 2013
m a n a g e m e n t | B e s t o f B r e e d
We discovered that most people want to fix what is wrong. They want to make things better”
A Geek’s Guide to IT ManagementFor people to excel in the workplace, a company needs to provide them with the right combination of technology, process and management By John Palinkas
i am a geek. I have always been a geek. And while I have always relished being a geek, I ended up in IT management and then consulting—and learned some valuable truths about people, pro-
cess and management along the way.Even at an early age, I was always fas-
cinated by computers. I remember when Atari first announced that it was would sell a home computer. The fact that I could have my own personal computer that I could use any way I wanted was revolutionary. Imagine that, my own personal computer. It had a 1.79 MHZ 8-bit processor with 16K of user memory. And the computer had expan-sion slots; I added memory cards and got a whole 64K of memory. Wow! But there was more. The Atari had peripherals! I could get an external disk drive and add 88K of removable storage. I had unlimited storage. Unbelievable! But then I saw the ultimate addition—an acoustic coupler modem. I could connect with other computers at 300 baud, using my phone line. I could interact with people and chat. Outstanding!
Of course, I had to have a technical career. My first position was as a programmer. I would be able to play with computers all day long. And they were going to pay me to do it. Life could not have been more wonderful. I got to learn COBOL and FORTRAN. The languages and computers were so much more sophisticated than my Atari, but I soon discover how limited I was. I could
write only application programs, so I had to become a system programmer. Now, there was a large commercial computer where I was the master. It was like having a large-scale version of my Atari that they paid me to play with! Life was good.
In those days, you could advance only so far in the technical ranks. So, I had to move
to management. But it was not so bad as I was managing technical people. And when my boss was not watching, I still got to do technical stuff. Also, I was managing a data center that was full of system programmers, each of whom were masters of multiple large commercial computers. Maybe being in management was not so bad after all.
ill
us
tr
at
ion
BY
ph
ot
os
.co
m
20 November 07 2013
B e s t o f B r e e d | m a n a g e m e n t
But, of course, you could advance only so far by managing technical people. By now, I had a friend who was my mentor and career advisor, and he advised me to take positions like strategic planning, prod-uct management and technical resource management. Along the way, I discovered there was more than technology, there was also process.
This was a way of making sure the tech-nology could be used in a repeatable way to ensure consistent results. I was fascinated again. I became a Baldrige exam-iner and scored applications of different organisations. I used ISO-9000 to imple-ment an operations center that could statis-tically guarantee results to their customers. I discovered the ITIL framework and how it could be used to significantly improve the service delivery function of any organisa-tion. During this period, I switched jobs a few times and ended up as an independent consultant. My first job was to participate in conducting an ITIL assessment, which how I met my business partner Charles Araujo.
It was during the course of this ITIL assessment that Charlie and I discovered the secret that had eluded both of us for years. The client com-pany was different than most organisations we had seen. The company had a very collabora-tive culture and truly valued its people as individuals, not as just another resource. Unfortunate-ly, this culture was getting in the company’s way and preventing it from being as responsive and nimble as required in the modern age. In working with the company, we were able to help it achieve results in six months that it had not been able to achieve in over two years.
What was the secret we discovered? People.We discovered that most people want to fix what is wrong. They want to make things better. They want to do the right thing. What gets in their way is a combination of tech-
nology, process and sometimes management. (Yes, all of the things I loved!) I can sum up our philosophy in the following guiding principle that we use:
All you need to do is to find a way to give these people an opportunity and you will be surprised at the results you can achieve. This geek has spent the past five years working with people and culture. What a surprise! It is not what I would
have imagined I would be doing when I started my career.
— John Palinkas is a partner at The IT Trans-formation Institute. ITTI is a catalyst for trans-forming the IT industry. ITTI helps change the DNA of IT teams, solving today’s problems and breaking the cycles that led to them, and to cre-ate next-generation IT organisations. — This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioin-sight.com.
6%Will Be the groWth
of it spend in apac By 2014
advts.indd 56 12/22/2009 3:02:47 PM
m a n a g e m e n t | B e s t o f B r e e d
Jack-upTechnology
The growTh in The Telecom secTor seems To be plaTeauing.
There is an opporTuniTy for cios To leverage iT for
jacking-up flagging growTh and fading revenues
by debashis sarkarDesign by Vikas Sharma, Illustration by Manav Sachdev
23november 07 2013
T e l e c o m | c o V e R S T o R Y
T he Indian telecom industry has been one of the fastest grow-ing sectors in the country. With more than 900 million subscrib-ers, India ranks next only to China in terms of subscriber base. However, the dynamics of the sector are fast changing. As competition intensifies, telecom providers are facing the chal-
lenge of developing innovative applications to attract customers. Operators are no longer hunting for more subscribers. For a CIO, this entails leveraging existing subscribers for increasing revenues. Technology lead-ers are increasingly being asked to improve opportu-nities to upsell or cross sell and be more user-centric.
Besides voice calls, operators are more interested in engaging subscribers for other services. With Mobile Number Portability (MNP), operators are now grap-pling to retain their existing customers. Telcos are forced to evolve into complete communication ser-vice providers catering to voice, Internet and future machine-to-machine (M2M) services.
On the device front, with the smartphone penetra-tion in India continuing to head north, consumers are now demanding more features at a lesser price. Manufacturers, therefore, have to constantly look at the next level of innovation for products differentia-tion. Also, they are struggling with connectivity issues in remote locations as smartphones without mobile
broadband connection makes no sense. Telecom equipment manufacturers are also witnessing a change as the government plans to promote domestically manufactured telecom products due to security reasons.
Keeping this transformation phase seems in mind, telecos are looking forward to improving their pro-cesses for enabling a better the customer experience. IT plays a major role in process improvement. The current situation presents CIOs with an opportunity to bring in technology innovations to help their busi-nesses and, in the process, transform the IT depart-ment into a profit centre from a cost centre.
Ground RealityThe changing landscape has got the stakeholders to feel the heat. At one end, the competition is erod-ing margins (India has a record number of 13 to 14 operators in a circle) and at the other end, the high cost of spectrum leaves little money to be spent on innovation and growth.
“The industry is very challenging as well as lucra-tive. This one of the industries which is future-proof and will not go out of business. Dependency on mobile related applications is going up, which is a good sign for us. However, the ARPU (Average Rev-enue Per User) remains low compared to the large subscriber base,” says Arvind Bali, Director & CEO, Videocon Telecom.
In the mature western markets, there are around
The telecom industry is going through a major transformation. It is witnessing intense competition and aggressive tariff wars. The scenario,
however, presents an opportunity for CIOs in the sector to bring in
technological innovations.
24 november 07 2013
three to five players per circle. According to the indus-try, the market can ideally accommodate a maximum of six players in each circle.
“The availability of spectrum for any operator in India is perhaps the least amongst developed and emerging economies. And we have to serve 10 times more subscribers in a particular area because of the large number of subscribers we have. So, we get one per cent resources where others may get 100 percent,” avers Anthony Thomas, CIO, Vodafone.
“We started with data but now all operators are caught up in the data race with voice receiving less priority. In the past one year, there have been a lot of regulatory compliances to improve the operational parameters in the telecom industry. As the data rates along with international roaming rates are heading south, lot of application penetration is happening, smartphone penetration is increasing, peer to peer SMSes are going down as the traffic is now moving onto applications. These are the major shifts happen-ing in the industry,” feels Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS.
Thomas feels, “As telecom is a very capital intensive industry, we need to consistently make substantial investments to not just grow but also retain our share of the market.”
Foreign investors along with shareholders are not keen to invest in the industry or back new ventures. Meanwhile, banks are also skeptical to finance tele-com projects except for a few top brands in the sector. If the current situation doesn’t improve, funding for new development would be scarce.
“The scams and related negetivity affected the tele-com industry a lot. The image of the industry was tar-nished greatly. As companies made huge amount of investments, after the licences got cancelled, it left a deep scar. This has affected new investments. Compa-nies are now more calculative and careful as they fear that if government supplied licences can get cancelled anything can happen in this country,” echoes Bali.
As India tip-toes into the age of smartphone, the mobile device's segment has been crowded by global as well domestic companies.
“With intense competiton in place, a lot of sub-standard products have crawled into the market. The smartphone industry is still in its nascent stage in India and a lot of growth is about to happen in this space, but companies will have to continue to innovate and make their products better everyday to survive the race,” says Anuj Garg, Technical Director, Zync Global.
The telecom industry is turning the corner. With the new merger & acquisitions policies, the regulators seem to be taking a more prudent view of the future of the industry in terms of how it can continue to sur-vive and contribute to the growth of the country.
in the past one
year, there have been a lot of regulatory
compliances to improve the operational
parameters in the telecom industry
Rajeev BatraCIO, MTS
PH
OT
O I
MA
GIN
G B
Y:
MA
NA
v S
AC
Hd
ev,
SH
IGIl
NA
rA
YA
NA
N,
Pe
Te
rS
ON
Pj
& v
IkA
S S
HA
rM
A
25november 07 2013
T e l e c o m | c o V e R S T o R Y
Tech ChallengesThe predominant technology challenge for telcos is cost. In the hyper competitive telecom market, operators are mainly focusing on how to provide cost effective services to customers. Given the scarcisty of spectrum in India, operators needs to ensure the best usage of the available spectrum to provide unint-erupted services and maintain the quality.
“From an IT perspective, the emerging challenge is to meet the changing expectations of the Indian consumers. Customers today do not go by just what is given to them. Customers have a wide range of options and if we don't provide them with what they want then they will surely move on and Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has made this even easier. At the same time MNP can be used as an opportunity as well to attract new customers with superior capabilities, offers and service. For IT, the focus is on providing cheaper services and main-taining a proper speed of delivery pipeline. We have to deliver our services to the businesses as fast as possible so that we don’t lag in the market,” says Thomas.
As the spectrum availabiliity is low and at the same time costly, operators need to be more effi-cient. “When some thing is cheap and easily avail-able, generating efficiency is difficult. So, low spec-trum availability and high costs drives the efficiency of the IT department,” feels Bali.
“One of the key challenges that I face as a CIO is the quick turnaround of the production tariffs that we are rquired to do. Since, the number of opera-tors is large, everyone is coming up with a new tariff plan almost everyday. To respond to it we have to come up with a new product or make changes to our existing tariffs,” avers Batra.
Though the challenges might appear different for a mobile device manufacturer, the roots remain the same. Both operators and mobile phone manufac-tures constantly look at innovation to better quality and help in customer retaintion.
“The consumer wants a good blend of quality and price. A lot of substandard products have entered the market. These brands tend to mar the reputa-tion of India-made handsets by promising a lot on paper and keeping the price at around 20 per cent less than the original market price,” says Garg.
Being a young telecom operator, Videocon Tele-com has to primarily make a position in the market first. “For us, the biggest challenge is to compete with big players in the market who have got a high customer base with high ARPU both in the perpaid as well as the postpaid segments. So, the custom-ers will only come to if we have something better to offer to them,” says Bali.
for iT,
the focus is on providing cheaper
services and maintaining a proper speed of delivery pipeline
Anthony ThomasCIO, vodafone
26 november 07 2013
c o V e R S T o R Y | T e l e c o m
Power ITThe government has recently approved 100 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in the telecom sector, which presents CIOs with an opportunity to bring in technology innovations to improve their processes and help businesses. The key industry focus would remain on increasing ARPU, delivering better cus-tomer experience, 3G services, setting the tone for 4G technology and enabling machine to machine (M2M) communication.
“In telecom, the key factors are usages and reten-tion. Both these elements contribute to the ARPU. The IT department helps us in big way in improving both the elements. Without the aid of IT department it would not be possible to track customer behaviour. They provide the critical customer inputs and helps shaping in shaping our services,” avers Bali.
The IT department has been playing a crucial role in the industry and the dependcy is expected to grow with new developments. “IT contributes heavily to the customer retention and the customer life cycle management processes which eventually adds to the ARPU aspect,” feels Thomas.
“Treat every customer as an individual and treat every interaction as very personal. So, the customer feels that he/she is the most important person for us. Providing the right kind of systems and informa-tions so that we can provide that personalised enrich-ing experience to our customers irrespective of the contact point they have. The IT has to think on how to provide that personalised, simple, common yet unique experience to our customers,” adds Thomas.
According to Batra, a lot of information flows in the telecom industry which can be analysed for insights to increase the ARPU. As voice usages is expected to remain the same, the focus is now on leverage mobile Internet. With increasing smartphone penetration, subscribers are becoming data-hungry and we expect this to drive ARPU.
The in-house IT team, along with the marketing team at MTS, came up with a product named MBo-nus, which has the capability of offering on-the fly voice and data proposition to the customers, basis their usage pattern. The unique part of the product is that it is completely automated and it works with a massively parallel and columnar analytical databases coupled with a data mining engine behind it.
Standardisation also helps in the overall control |of the space.
Sharing his innovative deployment of technology, Thomas says, “As Vodafone came across through many acquisitions and mergers, it made our sys-tems very disparate. To solve this, we came up with Project Unify. With Unify, we consolidated the point of sale and the customer acquisition process. We
with intense
competiton in place, a lot of substandard
products have come into the market
Anuj GargTechnical director, Zync Global
27november 07 2013
T e l e c 0 m | c o V e R S T o R Y
now have a common system in place which provides point of sale capability across the entire market. Ear-lier, when we had to make a small change in tariff, we had to do it individually in all the telecom circles. Now, with Unify we can make the changes at all circles in a single go.”
In a tightly-regulated industry like telecom, IT also helps in keeping up with the dynamic regulations. “With our standardarised processes we do not have to make the necessary changes and enforce the regu-lation in all the telecom circles individually. We just have to make the change at one place,” he says.
Most of the regualtions related to providing ser-vices to the customers or keeping a certain level of hygene in our business processes are IT dependent. From MNP to new activation processes IT manages it all, avers Batra.
Sharing the role of IT in following regulations, Batra says, “A lot of customers complained about getting value added services (VAS) activated with-out their knowledge. To cater to this problem, we deployed a solution that kept customers informed about their activities whether he has volutarily opted for any services or not.”
"In the interest of national security, the IT helps in SMS filtering to prevent malacious SMSes from reaching the end users," added Batra.
Garg, meanwhile, leveraged IT to improve device warrantly process at Zync. According to Garg, the company started with one year manufacturer reverse pick-up model at first. The company would get the device picked up from the customer, in case of any product related complains and then would return the device after fixing the complain. The pro-cess was time consuming and tedious.
"We came up a CRM solution to trace the entire servicing process. Once the customer logs into the CRM, we provide an automated checkup or else we suggest him a service centre. As soon as the product is received at the service centre, our CRM keeps track of it. With the CRM in place we can keep track of the entire servicing process and manage it accordingly. In case of repeated com-plains, we are able to get some data on the problem as well. With the CRM we can track whether he has reached the service centre within 48 hours, if not we call back to know the problem. This way we were able to increase the overall customer satisfac-tion," says Garg.
Moving forward, as operators become more digital in terms of products and services they offer to their consumers, IT can no longer be perceived as just an enabler. In many cases, IT is “the product” and the role of the CIO is changing from being a reactive entity to driver of business outcomes.
low spectrum availability and
high costs drive the efficiency of the iT
department Arvind Bali
director & CeO, videocon Telecom
28 november 07 2013
c o V e R S T o R Y | T e l e c o m
as voice usage may be plateauing, the two key growth areas in the telecom industry are data and M2M (machine-to-machine) communication. Operators are increasingly looking at M2M to generate future growth.
“Growth in voice might get stagnant in the future but data and M2M will surely help the industry grow,” says Arvind Bali, Director & CEO, Videocon TelecomAccording to Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS, M2M looks promising. Though the adoption rate might be low now, going forward M2M will proliferate. This was another reason why there was a shift from IPv4 to IPv 6 -- to aid M2M communication. “Vodafone is already the leader in this space. For us, the next level is to focus more on the rural popula-tion. For example, using M2M to deliver crop qual-ity monitoring for a farmers, tracking water trucks and more. In India, the rural M2M use cases are the ones that will make a huge difference,” aver Anthony Thomas, CIO, Vodafone.
Application of M2MConnected Car‘Connected Car’ technologies are at the frontier of innovation and the confluence of automotive, info-tainment and communications technologies. In a strategic technology partnership between Mahindra Reva and Vodafone, Vodafone provides Machine-to-Machine (m2m) communication services to power the electric vehicle, Mahindra e2o. Using their smart phones or any internet connected computer, e2o own-ers can, with Vodafone’s connectivity, access a host of services like the state of charge in the battery of their car and how far they can travel with the available charge; remotely control its air-conditioning and set schedules to pre-heat or pre-cool the car before they
DRiVing buSineSS gRowTh ThRough m2m
use it; lock or unlock the car doors and also find the nearest charging stations.
Power distributionM2M solutions have helped power utilities accelerate their mod-ernisation. CESC generates and distributes electricity to the twin cities of Kolkata and Howrah. In 2009, CESC decided to reduce manual processes and introduce increasing levels of automation. Vodafone delivered the capability for CESC to bring a smart metering solution to the market. Using Machine to Machine (M2M) connectivity, customer meters transmit power consumption data to CESC over Vodafone’s GPRS network. In addition, Vodafone has installed SIMs in Distribution Transformer (DT) meters which help CESC to monitor and resolve power sup-ply problems caused by overloading on the network. Vodafone has enabled CESC to install 16,000 meters to DT, industrial and commercial customer base and has helped to achieve a meter reading accuracy rate of 99.27 percent. Quality MonitoringAdvanced technologies have the ability to positively impact fortunes of rural India. One such example is that of a leading dairy based in Kanpur. It has lever-aged Vodafone's M2M-based location tracking tech-nology for tracking the milk distributing & procuring vans. This has helped them provide dynamic routing to the vans thus optimizing fuel costs and delivery time as well as reducing milk wastage.
from remotely controlled air-conditioning of a vehicle to maintaining the quality of milk in daries, m2m communication can power it all. cios are harnessing it for boosting revenues
as voice usage may be
plateauing, operators are increasingly
looking at m2m to generate future
growth
29november 07 2013
T e l e c o m | c o V e R S T o R Y
cioS neeD To change The minDSeT of STakeholDeRSin conversation with debashis sarkar, kamlesh bhatia, research director, gartner india, shares his views on the new challenges confronting cios in the telecom sector
30 november 07 2013
What is expected from a telecom CIO given the pressure to build business and become more com-petitive? The role of the CIO in India has been gradually evolv-ing from being an administrator and custodian of back-office IT to front line business centric enabler of change. In the earlier days, most CIOs were tasked with “keeping the light on“ and focussing on achieving operational goals as the market for mobile services continued to grow exponentially with most operators adding millions of new subscribers to their networks each month. In a bid to ramp up their inter-nal capability to manage this growth, many operators outsourced part or all of their IT to specialist vendors – often terming it “non-core part of business”, choos-ing instead to focus on marketing and subscriber acquisition related activities.
Over the last few years, there has been a noticeable slow-down as the market nears saturation for net new subscribers. This along with pressure on margins has forced operators to shift internal strategy from hunting to farming, bringing the role of IT back into focus. The knowledge of the subscribers and their context contained in the various IT systems is being seen as pivotal to improve opportunities to upscale or cross sell and also be more user centric. As operators become more digital in terms of products and servic-es they offer to their consumers, IT can no longer be perceived as just an enabler. In many cases, IT is “the product” and the role of the CIO is changing from being a reactive entity to driver of business outcomes.
What are the key challenges faced by Indian tele-com CIOs and how can they be ideally addressed?At one end there has been a sort of a complete shift in terms of postioning of IT, so, CIOs seem to be grap-pling with the fact that IT is no longer just an enabler but actually is a driver of new business. At another end, the CIOs are challenged with working in an environment (partners and employees) that essen-tially veiwed IT as non-core. So, CIOs have reached a point where they have to make their own employ-ees and partners to think differently. The challenge involved is bringing a complete change in the mind-set of the stakeholders to see IT as a core component of business change in the new digital world.
CIOs are also facing difficulties with skill and con-trol. To make IT as a business driver, CIOs need cer-tain skillsets in the organisation. Having the perfect blend of strategy and governance is necessary which is currently not in place. The control mechanisms are also not in place and to make matter worse - most contracts were signed seven to ten years ago with emphasis on operational efficiency and compliance as against innovation and change.
There is no one way for CIOs to counter these challenges. CIOs must first be clear with what the larger organisation wants to achieve in terms of strategic position. Gartner identifies that telecom operators based on their internal capabilities and market approach can achieve three end positions. Firstly, telecom operators can eventually play in the wholesale business and invest in areas which allow enhanced net-work control and cost effective operations thus becoming a “smart utility”. In the second state, operators will become an enabler invest-ing in horizontal capabilities in the areas of creating standard platforms or common exchange points where they will invite others to plug innovation and leverage customer intimacy. The third state is where operators will become diversified service provider and capture market share in adjacent markets like utility, media, retail. The role of CIO in each of these three different state is different. So, it is very impor-tant to have a clear picture of where your organisa-tion is heading towards. Then the CIOs need to start assessing and evaluating internal capabilities to meet those goals. Once the gap analysis is done, CIOs need to make strategies to fill those gaps and identify the right partners to work with. While doing so, CIOs must put in place a robust control mecha-nism with full ownership of key functions associated with enterprise architecture and standards.
How can a telecom CIO transform IT from a cost centre to a profit centre?As the business has evolved from hunting to farm-ing, the emphasis shouldn't be on brokering appli-cations and processes which consummed the maxi-mum time of a CIO. Now, the focus should be on realising the business value of the information that you have in your systems.
CIOs need to start working on building an advance information architecture. Many CIOs tend to get lost in the maze of legacy applications and creating tactical workarounds but the focus should ideally be on creating value points liked to business outcomes. Keeping in mind the new role if IT, CIOs need to see themselves more as frontline executives as against being custodians of the back office.
over the last few years,
there has been a noticeable slow-down as the market nears
saturation for net new subscribers
31november 07 2013
T e l e c o m | c o V e R S T o R Y
NEXTHORIZONS
Solve Your Toughest Q4 Challenge This Weekend Pg 34
Allied Building Products Rethinks DR Strategy Pg 36
FeATuReS InSIDe
Without implementation, ideas remain just ideas. Many organ-isations, however, are not built for supporting innovative ideas, as co-authors Vijay Govindarajan
and Chris Trimble point out in their new book, Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innova-tion in Any Organisation. Instead, the major-ity of organisations are built for supporting ongoing operations, or what the authors call the Performance Engine. For innovative ideas to be successfully executed in an organisa-tion, and for the practice of innovation to be
Turning Ideas Into InnovationsChris Trimble, co-author of Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization, describes three models for executing innovation initiatives By Jack Rosenberger
Ill
us
tr
at
Ion
by
an
Il t
32 November 07 2012
needs Model R. An example of a company that understands Model R is Hasbro, which produces thousands of new products, including new toys and new games, each year.
“Organisations get in trouble when they don’t understand the limits of Model R. There are two sharp constraints. You are limited to the people you already have, and you are limited to the way they are currently organised. When Hasbro launched a new video game venture, it made the wise move of creating a new team from scratch, bringing in software engineers and video game experts. That kind of step is absolutely necessary—and often overlooked.
“The only alternative to Models S and R is Model C, which is the most difficult of the three models, but also the most robust. Few companies, if any, are consistently good at it, even those that show up on the ‘Most Innovative Companies of the Year’ lists. Many companies struggle to build effective teams.
They imagine that the right answer is to either execute with the people in place or to build a completely separate team, but the right answer is the middle ground—a partnership between one group that works full time and another who works part time on the innovation initiative. Beyond the Idea prescribes exactly how to make this model work.”
— Jack Rosenberger is the managing editor of CIO Insight. You can follow him on Twitter via @CIOInsight. — This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioinsight.com.
compatible with the daily operations of the ever-important Performance Engine, Govin-darajan and Trimble propose three models in Beyond the Idea Model S, for small initiatives. Employees create time in their schedules to work on small projects.
Model R, for repeatable initiatives. A group of employees work full-time on innovative ini-tiatives, making the innovative practice both repeatable and predictable.
Model C, for custom initiatives. A dedicated team, often comprised of a mix of part-time and full-time employees, work on one initia-tive at a time.
It is vital, of course, to match the right ini-tiative with the right model. If a project can be executed by a few people in their spare time, Model S is perfect. If the initiative is similar to a previous initiative and the same people in the same roles can execute the same process, Model R is right. For all other initiatives, it’s Model C.
Properly executed, a Model C effort can lead to the development of “a new Model R process for launching a series of new and improved versions of the original innovation,” Govindarajan and Trimble note in Beyond the Idea. “The first iPhone was a Model C effort; each subsequent launch could be managed with Model R.”
Chris Trimble, a faculty member at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and an advisor to dozens of corporations, recently spoke with CIO Insight about the three models, innovation culture and unrealistic employee expectations, project management, and why Model C “is the most difficult of the three models, but also the most robust.”
People like to talk about big ideas, but the implementation of these ideas gets less attention“We have a certain mythology about innova-tion—that it’s about brilliant people and brilliant ideas. Every-one wants to be the visionary, the person with the big idea. Everyone wants to be part of the big idea hunt. But the truth is that the execution of innova-tion initiatives is much harder than most people imagine, and it demands much greater attention and energy than it nor-mally gets. ”
What are the most common mis-takes that organisations make when they use these three models?“Almost every company that I work with wants to create a so-called culture of inno-vation in which everyone can come up with new ideas and even take some initia-tive to make things happen. The problem is, if everyone is innovating, then who is responsible for day-to-day operations? Realistically, people are very busy, so trying to build a culture of innovation—described as Model S in our book—amounts to try-ing to squeeze innovation into people’s very scarce free time. “Model S does work, however, for small projects. It is possible to walk a mile by taking 10,000 steps. But companies often have unrealistic expectations of what Model S can deliver. People can execute small projects no larger than what one per-son, or at most a few people, can execute in their free time. That said, bigger projects require teams dedicated to a particular project. Of course, companies can afford only a few such teams. “One danger in trying to create a culture of innovation is that employee expectations can become unrealistic. Everyone thinks they get to be
an innovator, but realistically there are only resources for a few projects.”
Why doesn’t every organisation have Model R or strive for it?“A lot of companies do. Any company under constant pres-sure to bring out new and improved products, and do it on time and on budget,
$35mnWIll bE THE fINE
INfOSyS WIll pay TO THE US gOvERNmENT
fOR vISa fRaUd
“One danger in trying to create a culture of innovation is that employee expectations can become unrealistic”
33November 07 2012
m a N a g E m E N T | N E X T H O R I Z O N S
How to Solve Your Toughest ChallengeYou need to relax on the weekend in order to get breakthrough ideas By Marc J. Schiller
When was the last time you came up with a great idea or solved a big problem while grinding away at work?
It happens sometimes, but not too often.Now consider where you were and what you were
doing the last time you had a stroke of creative genius or came up with the solution to a difficult work problem.
If you’re like most people, the answer is probably something like “in the shower,” “while I was working out,” or “taking the dog for
a walk.” Basically, it happened when you were away from your desk and out of traditional work mode.
What We Can Learn From Archimedes It turns out that many of our best work-related ideas come to us when our minds aren’t focused on work, but rather when we are relaxing. For some people, “relaxing” means intensive sports. For others, it’s gardening, golf or just plain goofing off. Whatever the
34 November 07 2012
N E X T H O R I Z O N S | T R a N S f O R m a T I O NIl
lu
st
ra
tIo
n b
y a
nIl
t
surface activity may be, what’s happening below the surface is basi-cally the same thing regardless of the specific activity.
When we shift our attention from work-related matters to a relax-ing activity, our active foreground mind takes a rest from the rigors of work, but our subconscious mind keeps going, according to neuropsychologists. What’s more, without all of the noise of our foreground mind jackhammering away at the problem, the subcon-scious mind is more productive. It starts making intuitive connec-tions between ideas, activating pathways to stored experiences, and searching the subconscious mind for pointers to relevant informa-tion. In short, when your foreground mind is engaged in a relaxing activity that is unrelated to work, your creative subconscious kicks in. That’s why an idea comes to you literally out of the blue.
What else explains the one of the most famous “Eureka” moments in human history? Archimedes was caught up with a complicated technical problem he couldn’t solve—creating a method to measure the density of gold.
Frustrated with his lack of progress on the solution, he went to the baths. Lounging about, Archimedes noticed how the water rose and fell when people entered and exited the pool. Suddenly, eureka! He had a breakthrough: He could use water to measure gold’s density.
Make Time for Yourself in Q4Archimedes’ example illustrates a simple idea with an obvious call to action: In order to get through the heavy push of work that always comes in Q4, whether it’s coming up with the presentation that gets funding for your big data initiative, translating your 2014 budget into a workable plan, or designing the new customer noti-fication system, you have to take more time off. In fact, the more you are called upon to provide innovative solutions, the more time you need to free your mind.
Unfortunately, this advice flies in the face of conventional prac-tice, which is that the more work you have to do and the bigger the problems you have to solve, the less you let yourself step away from them. You are probably caught up in this right now.
It’s Q4. You need to finalize budgets, complete your annual com-mitments, and reach final approval for your 2014 plans, all while preparing end-of-year reports and juggling your team’s requests. You’re sure as hell not going away now in the heat of the crunch. What’s more, it feels extra strange to even consider doing so when almost everyone around you is in perpetual overdrive.
After all, I’m not talking about sneaking away for an extra 15 minutes for a walk after lunch. Stepping away to gain perspective takes real time. And while it’s hard to say how much time it takes to fully disengage from work and set your subconscious mind free to innovate in the background, it’s clear that available free time is a scarce commodity.
Where can you find time to disengage if you won’t take time off or abdicate your professional responsibilities?
This answer has its roots in biblical times, when it was first understood that, to be productive and effec-tive, human beings need a day of rest: the Sabbath. We’ve since expanded on this divine innovation and created the two-day weekend.
That’s right, the oft-forgotten weekend is the answer.
But not your typical weekend of today—one that is filled with catching up with e-mail, instant messages to colleagues who have “a quick question,” and a few hours finishing that special project your boss is waiting for and you never have time for during the week.
I mean a real weekend, like when we were kids and we had no homework. Translation: a weekend as far away from your com-puter and smartphone as possible, a weekend that isn’t dominated with must-do tasks. Alas, a weekend that’s nearly anathema to our always-on digital culture.
Make no mistake, I’m preaching to myself as well. I know it’s not easy. But I do my best to uphold my weekends. A couple of my colleagues at work unplug entirely from Friday night to Monday morning. This seems to shake out well for them. They spend time with people other than their coworkers. They indulge their hobbies and outside interests. They open their minds to relaxation. And in a couple days they plug back in with fresh insights.
Let me be clear: I’m not telling you to take the weekend off to better your soul. I’m telling you to take the weekend off so you can regularly get those breakthrough ideas you need to increase your professional contributions and advance your career.
Have a “Eureka!” Moment This WeekendRemember the example of Archimedes? While at rest, he solved a problem he was unable to crack no matter how many hours he spent
hunched over his workbench.Investing time and attention away from work isn’t a
waste; it pays dividends for both your mind and body. And by reclaiming the weekend you offer yourself the ideal opportunity to open yourself up to important insights during the busiest time of the year.
— Marc J. Schiller has spent more than two decades teach-ing IT strategy and leadership to the world’s top companies. rom CIO Insight
— This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioinsight.com.
$1bnWIll bE SpENT by
INdIaN HEalTHcaRE pROvIdERS ON IT SERvIcES IN 2013
“I’m telling you to take the weekend off so you can regularly get those breakthrough ideas you need to increase your professional contributions and advance your career”
35November 07 2012
T R a N S f O R m a T I O N | N E X T H O R I Z O N S
a year after Hurricane Sandy slammed the east coast of the Unit-ed States, leaving behind some-where in the neighborhood of $68 billion in damage, organisations
are continuing to rethink and reshape the way they approach disaster recovery (DR). Allied Building Products Corp., a distributer of building materials—including roofing, siding, insulation, wallboard, windows and doors—is among the busi-nesses that have stormed ahead with a more robust DR strategy.
The company, which boosts $2 billion in annual revenues and operates nearly 200 locations across the US, found its East Rutherford, N.J., data center under about four feet of water after the hurricane struck on October 29, 2012. “All of our network-ing and communications systems were contained in the facility, including physi-cal servers, storage subsystems and other equipment,” says Scott Fischer, information technology director for Allied. The firm lost data center operations at about 10 p.m. that night. Adding to the company’s misery, a secondary data center holding replicated data was also knocked off line because it too was located in the storm zone.
The event had serious consequences. Dur-ing the outage, the lack of the ERP system meant that sites around the country couldn’t look up inventory in the warehouse or at another store. As a result, there was no way to provide customers with an expected delivery time during the outage. “Although
Allied Building Rethinks DR Strategyuses Hurricane Sandy as a starting point for developing a robust DR strategy and infrastructure By Samuel Greengard
the Website wasn’t impacted and we don't do a lot of e-commerce, employees and customers were affected in other ways,” Fischer explains. For example, employ-ees had to hand write orders and tickets and submit them later.
Fischer immediately began to piece together a plan for resum-ing operations. He and other top IT officials at Allied assembled at a SunGard facility in Phila-delphia that held the organisation’s backup data. There, they began bringing enterprise systems back online and restoring data, based on tiers, to physical and virtual serv-ers. At the peak of the restore process, the IT group worked around the clock and man-aged half a dozen restore operations simul-taneously. The team spent approximately 40 hours getting the systems back up and running. By the evening of October 31, the company was once again able to function, but it took nearly four months to complete a new data center.
Fischer says Allied learned a number of lessons from Hurricane Sandy. “We had adopted the attitude that a disaster of this magnitude wouldn’t occur—and so we didn't take the advice to build out a more robust disaster recovery infrastructure,” Fischer says. “SunGard restored everything that was in our contract, but we discovered that we didn’t necessarily have all the equipment and backups in place that we needed. Some appli-cations and data weren’t covered.”
That led to a complete review of the DR environment and the addition of new virtual serv-ers and storage devices. Allied remapped the way it handles storage tasks and how it uses local storage. It also pointed out a need for additional ser-vices, including SunGard’s managed recovery process. “We now have everything in our contract that would allow us
to recover 100 percent of our applications,” Fischer notes. In addition, Allied relocated its secondary data center from 10 miles away to Scottsdale, Ariz. “There is almost no chance that we will be adversely impacted in the event of a future regional disaster,” he points out.
In the end, Fischer says that the disaster was a “relatively small bump” in the road and that, on the upside, it led to a far better disaster recovery strategy and infrastructure. Allied Building Products is now equipped to navigate a disaster or data center fail-ure with minimal downtime or adversity. “Disaster recovery is not something to take lightly,” says Fischer. “We learned that hav-ing systems down for 40 hours is not accept-able in today’s electronic and highly transac-tional environment. Systems and data must continue running.”
— This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioin-sight.com.
34%INTERNET USERS USE NO
pROTEcTION aT WI-fI HOTSpOTS
36 November 07 2012
N E X T H O R I Z O N S | S E c U R I T y
38 November 07 2013
TECH FORGOVERNANCE
A Renaissance in the Manufacturing SectorThe latent risk many CISOs in sector companies are waking up to is potentially huge By Rafal Los
Will be the size of cloud security market by 2015
$3bnDaTa BrIefIng
Ill
us
tr
at
Ion
by
sh
IgIl
na
ra
ya
na
n
39November 07 2013
s E C u R i T y | T E C H F O R G O V E R N A N C E
HPOInTS
5 Boards have begun to ask security
questions
CIos are conspiring
with CISOs to
modernise shop floors
there are a lot of
hurdles to overcome
users are likely
not accustomed to
being ‘managed’
make sure things
don’t fall through the
cracks
After what appears to be decades of systematically ignoring security challenges, the recent climate of breach-es seems to have shaken something loose. Purse strings have loosened. Boards have begun to ask security ques-tions when they have never done so before. And most of all, I'm seeing several organisations formally hiring CISOs and giving them both accountability and control over the security future of the enterprise. This makes me hopeful that change is in the air.
The problems with legacy dragThe latent risk many CISOs in sector companies are waking up to is potentially huge. Over the years, they've accumulated large volumes of perfectly siloed equipment, which was fully owned and managed by non-IT groups, and never connected to anything. As technology refresh cycles push forward, many of these previously standalone components (think about a set of computers attached to a machine that takes a raw piece of material and produces a machine-milled part based on a digital drawing, such as CAD/CAM) are getting network cards and are being connected to other shop-floor types of components. The design workstation is being attached to the manufac-turing station, to the quality control booth, and all tied together to the raw-material-management system. All over IP. Also, notice how I specifically pointed out that all these systems have not previously (and in some cases still are not) been available to the IT organisation for manage-ment and maintenance. This obviously means that secu-rity likely didn’t know they existed. Now they're being con-nected to the same flat, non-segmented, layer-2 network that the SAP and email systems are riding on. As these systems were previously managed by non-IT employees (in some cases it was an outside contractor) this translates to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. Imagine tak-ing one of these ICS systems, such as the assembly line control system, and handing it to someone in IT (and
Having worked in an enterprise security capacity in the industrial and manufacturing sectors, I’m one of the first to admit those two sectors haven't exactly been on the bleeding edge of security innovation over the past decade. The good news, if recent events hold, is the industrial and manufacturing sector appears to be going through somewhat of a renaissance. This is thoroughly exciting news for many of you who have been hearing stout opposition to your efforts.
then enterprise security) to manage. The results have not been positive. The other big challenge (as if we needed another) is that many of these systems easily qualify for the label of ultra-legacy. This means that they're greater than 15 years old and still functioning. In one example we've got a DOS-based application running off of a 1.44MB floppy disk on a 486/DX266 which manages the time cards of ~300 shop floor workers! This technology predates many of you reading this blog post, which means your immediate thought of “Why don't we just re-write this in Python?” is likely to break things in a way that will likely cause ripples through your supply chain and your bottom line.
Planning for the technology-driven futureAs one of my favorite CIOs put it, “We need to get with it right now, while our competitors are still largely in the same position, because we are entering a time when industrial and manufacturing enterprises are no longer able to ignore their dependence on technology.” This is so true. As enter-prises start to connect Widget A with ancient shop-floor Thing B, we inevitably find that not only do those combina-tions create security issues, but the systems themselves are antiquated and unable to provide much in the way of options for a more secure implementation. This means that CIOs are conspiring with CISOs to modernise shop floors, and overhaul technology. Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day and clearly this desire doesn’t translate into action as easily as that would appear. Lots of road blocks, integration challenges, and risks to be assessed. The good news is this is a topic for discussion, and folks like myself and others are being brought in to support these transformations. Again, this gives me a sense that the manufacturing and indus-trial sector is experiencing an industry-wide renaissance of sorts. An awakening to the needs of innovation requires kid gloves from my fellow security practitioners — as you well already know we get maybe one shot at this.
40 November 07 2013
T E C H F O R G O V E R N A N C E | s E C u R i T y
Gurus Reveal Their Mentors: The InfluencersHere are some well known security gurus sharing who they considered to be their mentors By Anthony M. Freed
When we talk about who our mentors are, many assign the role to that of a former teacher, an omnipresent icon, a past or present boss, or some other
who played a significant role in our personal and professional development.
We reached out to some well known secu-rity gurus to find out who they considered to be their mentors and asked them to explain the role their mentors played in shaping who they are today.
There were two very interesting results from this informal survey of leading info-
Looking the future in the eyeStep one of this entire renaissance is understanding in what ring of legacy IT hell you’re currently residing. This means spending a great deal of time reflecting inward and doing the equivalent of pulling at strings until yet another mystery unravels. I’m currently in the process with a few of these types of organisations of set-ting the guideposts for the next 12 months. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome and many engineers and line managers to win over with your charm. As I’ve already said, we will get one shot at this. The first time you crater a production-line system with a security patch because it needs to be applied for security reasons will likely be your last for a long while. Measure twice, then measure again and test before you make that cut.
The approach you'll be taking is one of assessment, transforma-tion, optimisation, management. Figure out where you are, make plans for making it better and execute to plan, slowly raise the bar over time and then make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Legacy systems. This should be self-explanatory as these are the siloed and previously un-managed or under-managed systems
which you suddenly have responsibility for securing since they now reside on your global, flat network. Speaking of your network, it may be high time to start thinking about segmenting and compartmentalis-ing ... this is, of course, much easier said than done—got netflow?
User base. Your users are likely not accustomed to being ‘managed’ in any traditional sense, and while they've been running successfully with self-managed full admin capabilities, your meddling and trying to lock systems down and define user and admin profile will cause a stir. Those of you in the manufacturing
and industrial sector — remember all that complaining you did that your enterprises didn't find value in what you provided? You're about to get your chance to impress the business with your intimate knowledge of what it is your organisation does, and how you should be supporting it going forward. You have a plan, right?
— This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecis-land.com. For more features on information security and risk man-agement, please refer to Infosec Island.
53%Will bE THE GROWTH OF TAblET mARkET iN 2013
sec pros, the first being that about half of the respondents indicated they could not necessarily pinpoint anyone in their career development who they would specifically describe as being their mentor.
In stark contrast, nearly as many who par-ticipated found it hard to narrow the field down to just one or even several individuals, and the passion with which they spoke of their mentors and the positive influence they had on their development was readily apparent. Mike Dahn, Head of Data Security Relations at Square, offered the observation that “traditionally we look to individuals
who are more advanced in their career to mentor us and act like a Sherpa guide who help us navigate the waters of life, career, family, and ourselves.”
“When people ask me for advice I often relay to them a story of something I’ve expe-rienced but more often I tell them a story of someone who has impacted my life. I’m just the messenger, and that is how we should view mentorship,” Dahn said.
In a similar vein, Josh Corman empha-sised that a great mentor does not neces-sarily have to be someone who has the kind of job or skill set that one would want to
41November 07 2013
s E C u R i T y | T E C H F O R G O V E R N A N C E
emulate, they can simply possess character elements that we admire and feel are worthy of emulation. In the three installments of this series, we look at those who fall into three broad categories: The influencers, the bosses, and the peers. First up are the influ-encers, those mentors who are recognised as being the catalysts responsible for land-ing our respondents where they are today:
Gene Kim (@RealGeneKim), Founder and Former CTO of Trip-wire, Author of The Phoenix Proj-ect, All Around GeniusMy mentor and a major influence on my career is Dr. Gene Spafford (@The-RealSpaf), one of the true luminaries and pioneers in the information security profession. In fact, the reason I went to Purdue University in 1990 was because of the seminal paper he wrote on the 1988 Internet Morris Worm. Imagine how awed and amazed I was to be taking undergradu-ate classes from him, and then later taking graduate courses – which in turn led me to be “asked” to the “leave” the engineering programme. Dr. Spafford is a true bound-ary-spanner, showing how in order for the information security field to truly succeed as a profession that it requires knowledge from business, the humanities, psychol-
ogy and even philosophy. I am grateful for everything Spaf has done for me, and all the other students he’s helped. I like to think that I solved a big problem for him and his wife when I bought his 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass for $200, which kept me rolling around in style for 2 years. Until I lost it…
Josh Corman (@JoshCorman), Director of Security Intelligence at Akamai TechnologiesThree key mentors have influenced my career path and overall philosophy, though in reality there are many more. The first is Dan Geer, CISO at In-Q-Tel, who brings a thoroughly ‘hard sciences’ background to security, which appeals to a part of me, particularly his emphasis on quality metrics and his analogous comparisons between aspects of immunology and the art of infor-mation security whichm are absolutely bril-liant. Though we have never worked for the same employer, it’s Geer’s ability to analyze security issues through complex and rigor-ous methodologies that has led me to emu-late him in many aspects of my work and in the various talks I have delivered over the years. I consider Geer to be our industry’s left brain. Next is Richard Thieme (@Neu-ralCowboy), an accomplished author and speaker who has a background rooted in
spirituality. Thieme studied at the Seabury Western Theological Seminary and was an ordained Episcopal priest who later became interested in the impact technology has on religious beliefs and the concept of identity.
Thieme is truly a one of a kind, especially in this field. Where Geer is our left brain, Thieme is most definitely his counterpart as our right brain. In fact, he is no less than the heart, soul and poet laureate of the secu-rity field, and he has deeply influenced my understanding of the more philosophical aspects of security, a field that many con-sider to be a wholly technical endeavor.
In a rare treat, I was able to interview both Dan and Richard (left & right brains) during a “fireside chat” for a SOURCE Boston 2013 Keynote. Of special note, Dan closed his comments by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” from memory (at 50 minutes). Richard then closed by recit-ing the last bits of “Ferg’s Law” from his “Islands in the Clickstream”.
Rounding out my trio of mentors is a world class critic, strategist and systems thinker Duncan Hoopes (@DuncRH) who conducts Security Management within IBM Security, and is very Socratic in his thinking and in the way in which he engages others. He has the uncanny ability to break down extremely complex issues that make them
A great mentor does not
have to be someone who
has the kind of job or skill set that one
would want to emulate
Ill
us
tr
at
Ion
by
ph
ot
os
.co
m
42 November 07 2013
T E C H F O R G O V E R N A N C E | s E C u R i T y
more accessible to people with a less techni-cal background, making him a very effective communicator. Hoopes forced me to read The Goal, a novel about a failing US manu-facturing plant. I asked him what the heck this had to do with security, and he told me that if I truly wanted to transform the secu-rity industry, I’d have to understand how The Goal and The Theory of Constraints transformed theirs.
Our intense white boarding, debates, and hunger for ‘first principles’ have had a significant impact on my work and inspired many of the key underlying aspects of Rugged Software, Rugged DevOps, and many of my ‘models’. It also put me on paths to find future kindred critical thinkers and collaborators like Gene Kim, Alex Hut-ton, and Jericho.
Bev Robb (@Teksquisite), IT Con-sultant at Teksquisit ConsultingMy mentor is Kurt Kovac, who currently directs resourcing at the UBS Central Test Factory (banking) in Zurich, Switzerland. He was always a certification geek: ITIL v3 Foundation; SCSA; MCSE; MCP; CNA; A+ and perhaps many that I am not aware of.
Back in the day, I was involved with writ-ers/poetry and thinking of framing my first novel. Computers were just boxes that allowed me to indulge in word processing, though I was curious about Microsoft oper-ating systems – but computing was not a passion. I could have been an entirely differ-ent person today had I never met Kurt. But, his friendship lit a fire for anything Cmd-line. Kurt definitely influenced me with his Unix/Linux expertise, as well as his hacking skills – ermmm, penetration testing skills. I could ask him anything and he would either
show me or find an answer. He will always be the friend/mentor who introduced me to Unix/Linux and he will always be the friend/mentor whose advice I value most.
I worked with Kurt in the Southern Oregon University networking department (when I went back to college as a nontradi-tional student). It was through his mentor-ing that I learned quite a bit about Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Unix, and networking. His initial Unix/Linux mentoring led me into other areas of curiosity such as check-ing out other university databases; develop-ing a strong interest in malware; and generally picking apart the windows oper-ating system to see how and why it was vulnerable. I once had a panel interview in 2002 for a scripting position with Kraft Foods in Parsippany, NJ.
Unfortunately, I was unaware that my headhunter had revised my resume to reflect that I could resolve viruses through Internet Explorer. I would have become quite the anomaly to the security world had it been true. The most difficult part of the interview was trying to convince a panel of five that I did not place that skill on my resume.
During this process I thought what would Kurt do? I knew that he would not argue a point that met on deaf ears, so I graciously told them that the interview was finished and that I had to leave. I believe Kurt is a resource that can be counted on.
Jeremiah Grossman (@Jeremi-ahG), Founder and CTO of White-Hat SecurityThe two most influential had to be John Davidson and John Dean, who both came at the very beginning of my entrepreneurial
start — namely, WhiteHat Security (it’s first two investors). They were the two who believed in me first when the idea of how we wanted to change the world was little more than an idea, a dream, and at a time when basically no one else did. Both of them are extremely accomplished, impres-sively so. Dean has been president and chairman of several banks, operated as start-up venture capitalist, founded his own VC firm, advised a great many companies in a board level capacity, and is even a former Peace Corps volunteer. While all of that is great, what mattered to me the most was his constant flow of personal anecdotes, the thoughtfulness that he puts in to cultivating personal and professional relationships, and his approach to business dealings.
One piece of wisdom in particular greatly influenced my life: “Interests must be in alignment.” Dean always said that, mean-ing that life or business is NOT a zero sum game. Everyone can and should be able to win if interests are aligned. I’ve tried to apply that to every business dealing, employee hire, and security strategy. Let me tell ya, it works.
John Davidson is a Computer Science PhD with roots back to ARPANET and the first implementation of TCP/IP. He’s also an entrepreneur whose first company was Ungermann-Bass, the networking indus-try’s first Local Area Networking company. He’s also been an angel investor, board level advisor to many start-ups, and worked with John Dean to start their VC firm.
Again, a very impressive background, but these facts alone don’t do the man any justice. For Davidson, accomplishment and ambition is all about quality of character and keeping of one’s integrity intact, and not just when things are easy, but especially when things are at their hardest.
If you can accomplish that, Davidson taught me, people will be able to depend upon you and trust you. When you work in security, what could be more important or more valuable than that? The ability to provide peace of mind in a environment dominated by fear.
— This article is printed with prior permis-sion from www.infosecisland.com. For more features on information security and risk man-agement, please refer to Infosec Island.
“Traditionally we look to individuals who are more advanced in their career
to mentor us and act like a Sherpa guide who help us navigate the waters
of life, career, family, and ourselves”
44 November 07 2013
VIEWPOINT
About the Author: Steve Duplessie
is the founder
of and Senior
Analyst at the
Enterprise Strategy
Group. Rgnised
worldwide as the
lent authority on
enterprise storage,
Steve has also
consistently been
ranked as one of
the most influential
IT analysts. You
can track Steve’s
blog at http://www.
thebiggertruth.com
A server is a box with CPU cores, memory, flash, and storage. A stor-age array is a box with CPU cores, memory, flash, and storage. A net-work switch is a box with CPU cores, memory, flash, and storage. Thus, really, what’s the difference between a white box server and storage array or a switch? Ports? Capacity? Big deal. The difference is the software function that is defined to execute on the various personalities involved. It’s not the hardware anymore.
You were supposed to sing that title to the Everly Brothers, by the way. A server is a box with CPU cores, memory, flash, and storage. A stor-age array is a box with CPU cores, memory, flash, and storage.
A network switch is a box with CPU cores, memory, flash, and stor-age. In the old days (last year), the storage and the network switch were LOADED with specialized CPU cores running “embedded” software/firm-ware. Now they run Intel cores run-ning application code (and an OS).
The “function” that those systems execute are in fact, software defined. If then, go to.
storage with software that defines its behaviour. Thus, if this is accurate, who stands to gain? Server guys. Intel. Dell. HP. IBM - as they build servers. New software companies who are rewriting the rules of device personality and behavior. Who stands to lose? Specialists - Cisco, NetApp, EMC, etc. Don’t panic, EMC isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Things take forever to evolve in this space.
However, it sure seems like the white box era is going to be upon us and that EVENTUALLY those who have dominated the last 50 years of commercial computing will be ripe for upheaval - in the same way that Amazon smoked the retail space.
Think about this — NO ONE develops applications the same way as they did just a few years ago (which they did for decades). People develop new apps for the DevOps hyper-scale, Mobile markets — not client server. Web scale/Hyper scale/Google scale, blah blah blah, means that EVERYTHING changes — from your app to your infrastructure.
Thus, really, what’s the difference between a white box server and stor-age array or a switch? Ports? Capac-ity? Big deal.
The difference is the software func-tion that is defined to execute on the various personalities involved. It’s not the hardware anymore.
Switching is a software function. Software-defined networking is just that — define the function — notably a transient PATH one elects to take based on actual application require-ments — creating it, executing it, and repeating.
Why not just perform that func-tion in software? Matter of fact, why not just perform it at the server itself - and screw the switch altogether?
The whole idea of the core/edge hierarchical switch architecture seems way last century with todays CPU capabilities. Why not have a flat horizontal network that gets fatter when necessary — based on application requirements? Scale out networking — no need for scale up.
Same for storage. That’s what the whole industry has been building anyhow. White box servers called
Software Defined = Everything is a Server Bye Bye Storage,
Bye Bye Networking...
STEVE DuPlESSIE | [email protected]
illu
st
ra
tio
n B
Y s
hig
il n
ar
aYa
na
n
http://surveillance.digisol.com
GEN
ESIS
Corporate Office:
Plot No.5, Bandra-Kurla Complex, Opp. CST Road, Santacruz (E), Mumbai 400 098
Keep a third eye onyour safety.
DG-SR2004DG-SC3610W DG-SC8860VPIDG-SC2600W DG-SC5800PIDG-SC2100
Switching I Broadband Routing I Wireless LAN I Converged Communication I IP Surveillance I LAN Communication
When it comes to the security of your family and business, nothing less than the absolute is acceptable. DIGISOL’s range of IP Surveillance cameras is the extra surety you need to keep an eye out for your family and assets.
1800 209 3444
AP_IND_PRN_Q2-14_36702_28x21 CIO Les.pdf 1 13/09/13 2:27 PM