Unlocking Knowledge

Reining theSocial Horses

PAGE 38

NEXT HORIZONS

DELIVERING PROMISE

PAGE 04

I BELIEVE

Beware of the Private Cloud

PAGE 16

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

A 9.9 Media Publication

Volume 06 | Issue 06

November | 07 | 2010 | 50Volume 06 | Issue 06

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CT

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an organisation without free flowing informationcan collapse. Ways to retain and make

knowledge flow uninterruptedin the organisation | PAGE 30

EDITORIALRAHUL NEEL MANI | [email protected]

107 NOVEMBER 2010CTO FORUMTHE CHIEF

TECHNOLOGYOFFICER FORUM

Beware of the Private CloudDr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com shares his views on the architecture behind Amazon Web Services.

EDITOR'S PICK16

Fareed Zakaria, the noted author and Editor at Large

of Time Magazine, wrote in a recent column: “When I travel from America to India these days, it's as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, economy is on the move. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the mood is sour. Americans are glum, dispirited

that knowledge. That is pretty much the ‘secret sauce’ (if you want to call it that) of our suc-cess. Somehow Indians have been firm believers in sharing knowledge unlike the western-ers who mostly believing in hording and protecting their knowledge assets. This Indian tradition is ancient and is now part of our DNA.

To keep the momentum going, you, as CIOs, have the great responsibility of harness-ing the potential of knowledge sharing for generating wealth for your companies, which ulti-mately contributes to the suc-cess of the nation.

For this, it is essential to have corporate knowledge (don’t read information) on a sharable net-work so that it can be accessed conveniently by the employees using any device. You should be able to create an infrastructure

and angry. The middle class, in particular, feels under assault. Perhaps most troubling, Ameri-cans are strikingly fatalistic about their prospects... The can-do country is convinced that it can't.”

What Americans can’t we can! I am glad an Indian, who has spent a large part of his life in the U.S., mentions it without mincing his words.

The core reason behind India’s success is its vast pool of knowledge and the creators of

that not only helps employees in accessing that knowledge, but also helps them properly use it. That’s how knowledge evolves, stays relevant, and becomes more valuable.

The question is how do you create such a network?

“Unlocking Knowledge’ – this issue’s cover feature will give you the right answers. The fea-ture will not only help you in creating an IT-enabled network for knowledge sharing but will also reveal how important the role of CIO is to execute it.

We hope you had a happy and prosperous Diwali – CTO Forum, your trusted knowledge partner.

We ‘Can’ Do What Americans can’t!

2 07 NOVEMBER 2010CTOFORUM THE CHIEF


NOVEMBER10

COVER STORY

30 | Unlocking KnowledgeNot only your systems, but your employees are also filled with knowledge. With social media platforms on the rise it is important that you channelise this knowledge properly in the enterprise.

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 Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o Kakson House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. D- 107, MIDC, TTC Industrial Area, Nerul, Navi Mumbai- 400706

COLUMNS04 | I BELIEVE: DELIVERING PROMISE Suneel Aradhye CIO - Steel and Minerals, Essar Steel Ltd. on aligning the IT enterprise with business.

52 | HIDDEN TANGENT: ANIMAL INSPIRED TECHNOLOGY Ways in which nature affects devices in our lives.BY GEETAJ CHANNANA

FEATURES42 | TECH FOR GOVERNANCE: FOUR CAREER ENDING MISTAKES while planning to move your data centre. BY IRWIN TEODORO

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307 SEPTEMBER 2010CTO FORUMTHE CHIEF


NOVEMBER10 Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj SinhaPrinter & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh

Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur

EDITORIALEditor-in-chief: Rahul Neel Mani

Executive Editor: Geetaj ChannanaResident Editor (West & South): Ashwani Mishra

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ADVISORY PANELAjay Kumar Dhir, CIO, JSL Limited

Anil Garg, CIO, DaburDavid Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy

Mani Mulki, VP-IS, Godrej IndustriesManish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo

India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCoRaghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India

S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFLSantrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group

Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices

Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank

Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay

Vijay Mehra, Former Global CIO, Essar Group

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38 | NEXT HORIZONS:REINING THE SOCIAL HORSES Keeping track of employees' social media usageBY SUSAN NUNZIATA

REGULARS

01 | EDITORIAL08 | ENTERPRISE

ROUND-UP

advertisers’ index

EMC IFC APC 5, 11SAS 7SUN 13POLYCOM 14-15SYBASE 19CHECKPOINT 21ACE DATA 51IBM IBCCANON BC

This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume

any liabilities for errors or omissions.

49 | HIDE TIME: JS PURI, CIO, FORTIS HEALTHCARE is a man of many passions, be it his personal life or his profession.

49


16 | Beware of the Private Cloud Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com shares his views on the architecture behind Amazon Web Services.

16

38



I BELIEVE

CURRENTCHALLENGE

BUSINESSES ARE TRANSFORMING THEMSELVES, THIS CREATES CHAL-LENGES THAT INCLUDE DRASTIC CHANGES IN ROLES/EXPECTATIONS AND A PERCEIVED LOSS OF IDENTITY.

THE AUTHOR HAS has over 25 years diverse experience in finance domain and IT management

in various industries. He is also a Member of Steel Business Management Committee.

Delivering Promise Aligning the IT enterprise with business

taneously, the rapidly evolving user communities — comprising young, mobile and globally connected people — are more savvy putting more demands on IT organisation while appreciating the security concerns.

Already businesses with lean staff-ing are willing to invest more in tech-nology rather than people. Sporadic cases of CIOs playing strategic roles in shaping future business are more often than not exceptional cases of individual brilliance than moves that happened by design.

For the information technology function to become truly strategic within businesses, the whole IT organisation needs to transform itself by building the right organisational structure, a business-like culture, and a strong, capable leadership pipeline. IT must demonstrate business values by putting innovation at its core.

At ESSAR Steel, when we were transforming the IT enterprise, chal-lenges included drastic changes in roles/expectations and a perceived loss of identity. It was easy to keep the team together by using our organi-sational capabilities and ‘culture essentials’ to explain why the change was important and how it would help them add value to business.

Businesses today clearly expects CIOs to see things their way:

Move to SLA-based Shared Services models

Obtain the right enterprise archi-tecture with the right mix of tech-nologies/solutions

Get the best business value out of the IT spend

In summary, focusing on building the right organisational capabilities and ‘living culture essentials’ is very important. At ESSAR, we focus on Project Management, Operational Excellence, Nurturing, Negotia-tion, Entrepreneurial Orientation and Customer Focus to ‘Deliver the Promise’ to the business.

CIOs should leverage their understanding of organisational capa-bilities and culture to transform the IT enterprise for better align-ment with business.

Clearly define organisational roles and responsibilities to meet the strategic objectives of the business, and articulate what this means to the role of every individual in the IT enterprise. Markets today are extensively integrated and interdependent, and businesses in the emerging markets have sensed this cross-border opportunity.

They have also started tapping talent across industry sectors. Simul-

BY SUNEEL ARADHYE CIO - Steel and Minerals, Essar Steel Ltd.

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LETTERS

WRITE TO US: The CTOForum 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]

18 21 OCTOBER 2010CTO FORUM THE CHIEF


Business Intelligence SPEC IAL

1921 OCTOBER 2010CTOFORUMTHE CHIEF


Business Intelligence SPEC IAL

No HypeAll Real

The biggest benefits of consolidating data

from systems:

Which would be the primary area in which you feel a BI

solution would give the maximum return on

investment?

Single view of the customer across all business lines

Consolidated financial and risk view of data across all product lines

Both of the above

Risk & Compliance

Financial and profitability reporting

Operational Reporting

Customer intelligence (including cross sell, up sell recommendations)

5%24%

26%

45%

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence has come out of the hype cycle. It is now a realistic technology – tested, tried and ready for mass deployment. Are you still thinking? By Rahul Neel

Mani

If you follow the Hype Cycle of technology analyst firm Gartner, you will find a big change this year. Business Intelligence, which was on the top of the charts for last few years, lost its position. This could only

indicate one thing: While its adoption rate of 20-25 percent by itself doesn't reflect this, the technology seems to have found many homes. In other words, there is yet to be a massive tilt towards deploying BI tools, but there certainly is an increasing number of takers.

Unlike ERP, which swamped the enterpris-es in last one decade, BI is still the choice of a select few – mostly those who either have massive customer data or those who are in a fiercely competitive environment. But the scenario is changing slowly.

A decade (or so) ago, simple MIS (man-agement information system) reports were enough to do business and inven-tory forecasts. Perhaps customers didn’t have many options to choose from either,

helping a few vendors maintain healthy market shares and consistent growth. Today consumers have got variety, and they are also certainly more aware of their privileges. Businesses need more than MIS reports to analyse markets. To enable intelligent decision making and bringing actionable insights out from the existing data warehouses or ERP data, businesses require tools that could help in looking into the future.

PRODUCTIVE TOOLSupported by a software stack that pro-vides insight into business and its operat-ing environment, Business Intelligence (henceforth BI) is one of the most produc-tive tools for progressive, modern enter-prises. Most of us, for a long time, weren’t able to differentiate between standard reporting tools and BI. Standard report-ing is a good tool to know the historical data that shows what has happened in the past. It won’t tell you why something hap-pened, or whether it can be prevented or improved upon in the future.

CIOs and other specialists who have either implemented or are preparing a BI roadmap need to ask and answer the follow-ing five questions: Why does my organisation need BI? What tools does my organisation need and what purpose will they solve? How do I select the most appropriate BI tools? How do I implement BI in my organisa-tion? How do I ensure BI TCO?

WHY BI?Most businesses, by design, are destined to move forward, not backwards. MIS reports, which mostly provide information about the past and churn out data based on past incidents, cannot drive a forward looking organisation. Instead, it can lead to massive errors through incorrect assumptions.

BI as a tool is meant to not only elimi-nate the human imperfection from intel-ligent decision making but also assist busi-nesses to look in to the future. It empowers businesses to take decisions based on evidences and not inept assumptions. This very characteristic of the BI tool helps in cleansing the entire enterprise decision making process. It leaves no room for per-sonal biases, enthusiasm and inputs and helps in driving you into activities that ulti-mately support your business productivity and profitability goals.

BI, unlike plain vanilla reporting, reduces the decision risk and empowers you to you streamline the manufacturing, sales, opera-tional, marketing and many other many activities. In all, it is meant to help produce the most valuable insights from the least amount of resources.

WHAT TOOLS FOR WHAT PURPOSE? One can easily lose focus at this stage. A lot of due diligence is required to get past this stage of BI journey. As an organisation, one may be used to a plethora of applications from multiple vendors. The lure of a steal may entice a CIO to go with one of his or her existing vendors for the BI stack as well – an approach that might prove Faustian.

“Relying on the vendors to conduct their interpretation of due diligence and discov-ery could add a level of uncertainty and disconnect that may result in a reporting tool that does not meet expectations,” says Alec Smith, Vice President Projects, at U.S.-based SWK Technologies Inc.

On the one hand, if it is important to ascer-tain what BI tools to use, it is equally important to know what purpose those tools will serve. One of the biggest issues that a CIO might face is the lack an internal vision. Don’t fall for short-term gains. Communication between all important departments such as sales, market-ing, production and supply chain to create a 'demand document' is crucial to ensuring that the tools deployed will remain effective.

It might seem contradictory, but it isn't: relying on 'human' wisdom, and on the knowledge and wisdom of many, holds the key. The key here is information. Technol-ogy is merely a means to an end. Mahesh Manchi, CIO at Mahindra Resorts and Holidays suggest that a CIO can just be the catalyst of a BI implementation. “A lot depends on the business folks on how much they're able to see what the CIO sees. In many organisations the business execu-tives (at operational levels) are reluctant to back these kinds of implementations which finally defeats the whole purpose,” he says.

Some CIOs also aren’t well versed with business, they understand technology. BI is a business issue just like an ERP or CRM. The reason a lot of ERP, CRM and BI projects fail is because they are not led with business focus. If the goals of a BI project are nor well defined, the implementation is bound to fail, says Israel Ptashnik, a business technology strategy consultant and coach at Business Technology Strategy, Israel.

WHICH IS BEST?BI can become very confusing at times. Gen-erally, when an organisation realizes that it

21%

11%

68%

No Hype

SOURCE: CTOF BI SURVEY 2010

No Hype Both of the above

helping a few vendors maintain healthy market shares and consistent growth. Today consumers have got variety, and they are also certainly more aware of their privileges. Businesses need more than MIS reports to analyse markets. To enable intelligent decision making and bringing actionable insights out from the existing data warehouses or ERP data, businesses require tools that could help in looking

How do I select the most appropriate BI How do I select the most appropriate BI tools? How do I implement BI in my organisa- How do I implement BI in my organisa-tion? How do I ensure BI TCO? How do I ensure BI TCO?

WHY BI?Most businesses, by design, are destined to move forward, not backwards. MIS reports, which mostly provide information about the past and churn out data based on past incidents, cannot drive a forward looking organisation. Instead, it can lead to massive errors through incorrect assumptions.

BI as a tool is meant to not only elimi-nate the human imperfection from intel-ligent decision making but also assist busi-nesses to look in to the future. It empowers

face is the lack an internal vision. Don’t fall for short-term gains. Communication between all important departments such as sales, market-ing, production and supply chain to create a 'demand document' is crucial to ensuring that the tools deployed will remain effective.

It might seem contradictory, but it isn't: relying on 'human' wisdom, and on the knowledge and wisdom of many, holds the

BRAINOF THEMATTERBI has come out of the hype cycle. It is now a realistic technology – tested, tried and ready for mass deployment. ARE YOU STILL THINKING? | PAGE 17

NO SUCH THINGAS BUSINESS

INTELLIGENCE 2.0PAGE | 40

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

THE REAL

CHALLENGE

PAGE | 36

STAYING AHEADOF THE CURVE

PAGE | 28

RECKONER

NICHE BI VS.

OPENSOURCE

IntelligentTalkingPAGE 12


S P I N E

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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SPECIAL ISSUE


IMPLEMENTATION

FRAMEWORKPAGE | 38

PAGE | 42


JET SETTER


NO HYPE

BUSINESS

THROUGH BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PAGE | 24

TRANSFORMATION

ALL REAL PAGE | 18

PAGE | 26

AS AN ATM

PAGE | 30

AS EASY USING

INTELLIGENCESMARTLY PAGE | 32

BI VENDORS

A READY

PAGE | 34

ATTRIBUTES OF A GOOD CTOCTO acts as a bridge between business needs and how technology can be used best to apply right levers to either increase business avenues for example on product innovation side or increase productivity internally to service our cus-tomers better. He should have good under-standing of management vision and should be be able to think boundry less in terms of ap-plication of technology trends. CTO or a CIO ( both have dis-tinct job sphere in today's con-text ) is instrumental in making a strategy operational.ABHISHEK DWIVEDI, AGM at Conjoin Group



LEADING CHANGE

“The CIO must actually take the lead in redefining the business. This requires first and foremost, that the CIO deeply understand the business, far beyond the day-to-day operations as currently conducted.”To read the full story go to:

www.thectoforum.com/content/leading-change

CTOF Connect Open Source BI approach has been led mostly by Jaspersoft. Brian Gentile, CEO, Jaspersoft in a telephonic interview from San Francisco discusses where it's all headed.

http://www.thectoforum.com/content/niche-bi-vs-open-source

OPINION

MEENAKSHI AGRAWAL VP-IT, Mumbai International Airport Pvt. Ltd.

CTOForum LinkedIn GroupJoin close to 500 CIOs on the CTO Forum 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

CTOForum group at:

http://www.linkedin.com/

groups?mostPopular=&gid=2580450

Some of the hot discussions on the group are:What are / shuld be the attributes of a good CTO ?

What are the prerequisites for a CTO role ?

CTO should have the ability to translate business goals

into technology solutions and manage the day to day

running of IT technology. CTO should be a very good com-

municator and should be able to explain technology to

non-technical users.

—Boman Nakra CIO, Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank

Positioning the CIO as a Powerful Business

Partner

The IT environment of today is simply too complex to rely

on outmoded ways to keep the organization functioning

and thriving flawlessly. A CIO must be a true business

partner, someone who can not only drive out costs from

day-to-day operations, but strategically manage IT to

enhance revenue and profits.

—Ashfaque AhmedGM, IT, R & R Group

CIOs can catalyse positive change.



Enterprise

ROUND-UP

INTERVIEW INISDE

PCoIP is Not an Incomplete

Protocol. Pg 10

PREDICTED SEMICON-DUCTOR APPLICA-TION YEAR-OVER-YEAR GROWTH FOR 2011.

Mobility a Trillion Dollar Business by 2014. As analysts explore the changing face of the business.WORLDWIDE mobile voice and data revenue will exceed one trillion dollars a year by 2014, according to Gartner. Mobile will generate revenue from a wide range of additional services such as context, advertis-ing, application and service sales, and so on. Each of these will be a significant business worth several tens of billions of dollars per year.

“We see three major eras of mobility,” said Nick Jones, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The device era was characterised by iconic devices like Motorola RAZR and was dominated by device manu-facturers. This was followed by the application era

which arrived with the iPhone, popularising applica-tion and media stores. Going forward, the service and social era will build on the application era, but it will be characterised by cloud services and streaming media.”

Gartner believes that context will be a defining principle of mobile business for the next decade. It will play a key role in many areas of mobile busi-ness, especially advertising and marketing.

Thus, enterprises must develop a high-level mobile strategy based on technology-independent manage-ment goals and styles, rather than detailed device, platform or application policies.

9%DATA BRIEFING

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An 81% majority of respondents to a survey by Juniper admitted using their devices to access corporate networks without their employer's knowledge. More than half of those who access corporate networks without permis-sion, do so every day.

QUICK BYTE ON GLOBAL MOBILE SECURITY

Broadridge Offers More to Institutional Players. New solutions to support brokerage firms.BROADRIDGE Financial Solutions will offer its new market connectivity solutions operating in the India markets, either domestically or on a cross-border basis. The India market extensions include direct connectivity to India's two leading exchang-es, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE), and the required custodian settlement capabilities including contract note generation and reconciliation of obligations, according to the statement.

These solutions can be provided as integrated components of Broadridge’s Gloss solution on either an ASP service bureau basis or for on-site implementation, or alternatively they can be integrated with a brokerage firm's own technology solu-tions. Gloss is a real-time, multi-currency, transaction processing engine which automates the trade processing lifecycle from trade capture through to confirmation, clearing agency reporting and settlement, according to the company’s Web site.

"Increasingly, firms are looking to grow their businesses and offer greater cli-ent choice on a global basis," said Tom Carey, President, Securities Processing Solutions, International, Broadridge. "We are firmly committed to helping them to accelerate the growth of their capital markets operations and expand into new global markets and asset classes faster and on a cost-effective, low risk basis."

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has followed up after blasting the new HP CEO Leo Apothekar over him mastermind-ing a scheme while CEO of SAP AG to steal Oracle's technology. Now if HP decides to keep their new CEO away from HP Headquarters until the trial is over, Oracle can't subpoena him to testify at that trial.

—Larry Ellison ,

CEO, Oracle

“A few weeks ago I accused HP's new CEO, Leo Apo-theker, of overseeing an industrial espionage scheme... my guess is that HP will keep its new CEO far, far away from the Court-house until this trial is over.”

THEY SAID IT

LARRYELLISON

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far, far away from the Courthouse until this trial is

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PCoIP is Not an Incomplete Protocol. Seema Ambastha, Director- Systems Engineering & Technology at VMware talks to Vinita Gupta.DISCUSS about VMware’s View 4 solution

The software version of the PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol with VMware View 4 pro-vides end users with a dramatic improve-ment in user experience across a wide variety of tasks and end point locations. VMware View customers will be able to take advantage of the PCoIP protocol to deliver virtual desktops across the LAN and WAN, for usage scenarios that span

from task-based users to designers with demanding 3D requirements.

Q: Will this solution support both software and hardware based endpoints?A: Software endpoints will use the PCoIP functionality in the VMware View Client for Windows and Linux, whether on a full PC or a traditional thin client. For hardware-based endpoints, ‘Zero Clients’ will provide PCoIP

67% of large compa-nies with 5,000 or more employees reported one successful intru-sion or more this year, compared with 41% in 2009. For the first time, the survey delved into the causes of network intrusion.

functionality in the firmware leveraging Teradici chips for the most demanding CAD/CAM user. These ‘Zero Clients’ have no local operating system so they offer both the high-est performance with native PCoIP firmware and the least cost of ongoing management.

Q: How PCoIP is different from traditional display protocols?A: For desktops hosted in the datacenter, the screen, keyboard, and mouse must be ‘dis-played’ to a remote endpoint. The display protocol performs this function.

IT organisations have historically faced challenges when using traditional display protocols to try to deliver a full fidelity expe-rience to end-users. These challenges have therefore reduced the reach and limited the possible use cases for desktop virtualisa-tion. The introduction of VMware View with PCoIP delivers a rich user experience over any IP network—thus addressing more use cases and accelerating the adoption of desk-top virtualisation solutions.

Q: PCoIP consumes more bandwidth than HDX and as CPU and bandwidth consump-tion rely on server that means the companies using PCoIP have to invest more on servers?A: This is a myth. If you benchmark HDX on a unconstrained 100 Mbps for a single user and use that as baseline it may look unimpressive. On the other hand PCoIP protocol dynamically adjusts image quality and frame rate based on available band-width. Maximum bandwidth can be capped to limit bandwidth utilisation. PCoIP proto-col fairly shares the bandwidth when mul-tiple user sessions are active.

Q: According to your competitor Citrix, PCoIP is an incomplete protocol.A: It is not an incomplete protocol. Teradici is a leading provider of graphics, they have tested and partnered with VMware View which is been adopted by companies. It is a zero data loss protocol.

Q: Mention some of the companies using the VMware View solution? A: The A.P. Mahesh Co-operative Urban Bank Limited is India's premier Urban Co-operative Banking Institution. They have implemented VMware View which has reduced total cost of ownership by 50%.

GLOBAL TRACKER

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67%41%

Companies reported at least one suc-cessful attempt in 2010.

Had at least one intrusion

attempt in 2009.

Network Intrusion

E NT E R PR I S E RO U N D - U P



Apple Leads the Pack. The worldwide mobile phone market grew 14.6% in the third quarter of 2010.

AIRLINE TECH

Qantas has introduced an

innovative Baggage Rec-

onciliation System (BRS) that

uses radio waves. Australia's

first self-service baggage check-in

facility, part of the airline's ‘Next

Generation Check-in’ initiative

is designed to streamline and

speed up a passenger's journey

through the domestic airport,

according to the statement.

RFID will track and verify bags

with Unisys providing systems

integration; implementation and

rollout services; application host-

ing and support for BRS.

In the first stage of the solu-

tion's roll-out, passengers at

Next Generation Check-in air-

ports are able print their bag tags,

which have an identifying bar-

code, at a check-in kiosk before

taking bags to the bag drop area.

On the bag drop belt, barcodes

are scanned to link bags to the

passenger's flight information.

Passengers can purchase addi-

tional baggage allowances on the

spot or beforehand via the web.

An intelligent chip-enabled bag

tag, called a Q Bag Tag, will be

given to Platinum, Gold and Sil-

ver Qantas Frequent Flyer mem-

bers to use as part of a premium

service, eliminating the need for

these passengers to print a new

bag tag each time they fly. The Q

Bag Tag will use RFID technology

to allow a bag to be quickly iden-

tified and tracked, according to

the statement.

THE GROWING popular-

ity of converged mobile devices, or

smartphones, with consumers and

businesspersons is evidenced by the

appearance of a second smartphone-

only vendor in the top 5 ranking.

Apple moved into the number 4

position worldwide in 3Q10, joining

Research In Motion (RIM) as one of

VOCALINK, a UK-based technology provider for electronic payment services, reports a survey it conducted among some British bank account holders found the respondents eager for ‘immedi-ate’ mobile payment options.

Vocalink’s 'Voice of the Customer' research shows the ability to make inter-bank payments immediately via a mobile phone holds a strong appeal for the modern consumer due to its speed and convenience, according to the statement.

The survey, of 2,000 British adults who had bank

Mobile Options for Payments. Is M-Payment the way forward ?

FACT TICKER

the world's largest mobile phone sup-

pliers. RIM has spent three quarters

on IDC's leaderboard.

"The entrance of Apple to the top

5 vendor ranking underscores the

increased importance of smartphones

to the overall market. Moreover, the

mobile phone makers that are deliver-

ing popular smartphone models are

among the fastest growing firms,"

said Kevin Restivo, senior research

analyst with IDC.

Apple, RIM, and the vendors pro-

ducing Android-based smartphones

have put noticeable pressure on

Nokia, the overall market leader.

"Nokia still leads all vendors by a sig-

nificant margin for converged mobile

devices and mobile phones as a

whole," said Ramon Llamas, senior

research analyst with IDC's Mobile

Devices Technology and Trends team.

"However, Nokia's grip on the tradi-

tional mobile phone market has been

somewhat loosened."

accounts, found 42 per cent of the respondents and half of those who already make online pay-ments would find making a payment immediately via a mobile phone extremely valuable.

"Our research shows that as mobile phone usage continues to grow, Immediate Payments has the potential to become ubiquitous,” said Kris Kubiena, Director of Consulting Services at VocaLink .

“In today's modern world, both consumers and small businesses need to be able to move money instantly and easily. The Faster Payments Service in the UK has facilitated this requirement and now we have the ability, through Immediate Mobile Payments, to offer this service to interna-tional audiences,” Kubiena said.

More than three quarters of all consumers surveyed use coupons when shopping, with 29% of UK and 15% of US consumers having already used a mobile coupon. Furthermore, the survey results revealed 71% of UK and 42% of US mobile users said they would be interested in receiving mobile coupons while they are shopping in a store to alert them.

Convenience and portability are likely to be the drivers of uptake in this area, alongside provid-ing an integrated system to organise consumers’ financial lives. The advantages of m-commerce for brand owners encompassed creating new revenue streams, such as via SMS and the mobile web. Moreover, the measurability of this medium, similar to the internet, could yield valuable intelli-gence into consumer behaviour. As many emerg-ing market shoppers do not have access to official bank accounts, micropayments through this route should strengthen the position of advertisers in developing economies.

Apple moved into the number 4

mobile phone makers that are deliver-

ing popular smartphone models are

among the fastest growing firms,"

"Nokia still leads all vendors by a sig-

nificant margin for converged mobile

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What, in your view, is the philosophy behind Unified Communications?A: As companies address today's market trends—such as the global economy, reces-sion, pressure on budgets—they need ways to improve the productivity of their employees, lower costs and improve their competitive advantage. A key means to accomplish this is Unified Communications (UC), which brings together telephony, e-mail, presence, confer-encing, mobility, instant messaging, content sharing, and other communications solutions into a single continuum or network—all of which have been siloed in the past.

Not just for large global enterprises, organisations of every size are turning to unified communications both inside and outside the organisation.

Should UC be on the radar of the top exec-utive in an organisation? Why?A: Yes. The business landscape is changing and organisations are increasingly looking to leverage real-time group collaboration

to not only improve productivity, but reduce travel costs, align geographically dispersed teams and to maximise the use of specialists. Unified Communications (UC) addresses the growing demand for such services by bringing together data, voice, applications and videos into a single continuum or network for more effective communication and collaboration, while also enabling companies to accelerate decision making and maintain competitive advantage.

A great range of social, technological, environmental and financial trends are influencing the market for unified commu-nications. Contemporary business realities such as globalisation, worldwide competi-tion, and the need for business continuity has paved the way for life-like experience for communication and remote meetings from anywhere around the world. Telepresence and video conferencing solutions help enter-prises to work faster, smarter, and more effectively and efficiently.

Polycom is a leading provider of integrated,

UC is Relevant to Allend-to-end unified collaboration solutions that help organisations meet both productivity and cost containment challenges. By leverag-ing Polycom’s leadership in all aspects of a face-to-face meeting that include hearing each other (audio), seeing each other (immer-sive telepresence and video) and sharing con-tent, Polycom makes meeting over distance just as productive as being there. Polycom enables rapid and collaborative decision-making, by shortening chains of communica-tion over distance, and continuously enabling innovative products and services. Polycom solutions have become critical to companies and organisations trying to win in today's increasingly competitive world.

What are businesses doing globally in the way they communicate both within the organisation and with the outside world that makes UC highly relevant?A: Today’s global businesses have to deal with dispersed workforces, multiple vendors, partners etc. In order to deliver better

POLYCOMBESPOKEW O R K S

NEERAJ GILL Managing Director —India and SAARC, Polycom Inc

Neeraj Gill was ‘hand-picked’ to aggressively exploit opportunities in fast-growing unified communications industry; extend video communications market leadership. A 20-year ICT industry veteran, Gill is responsible for business strategy, and for extending important market share – particularly in the fast-growing video conferencing market.

collaboration over distance and maintain business growth, effective communication between these entities is the most vital pillar of success. With unified communications, organisations can maintain business continuity, and accelerate growth, overcoming barriers of time and distance. True-to-life communications improves productivity and resourcefulness.

A unified communications approach is indispensable for today’s competitive enter-prise landscape, as it provides:

Global and remote workforce: Increases scalability, flexibility and promotes an open-standards approach to collaboration;

Cost Cutting: Reduces communication costs, facilities cost and travel cost;

Availability of HD video conferencing at an affordable price: Ability for organisations to connect the most people, in the highest qual-ity at the lowest cost;

Focus on reduction of carbon footprints by reducing the need to travel, leading to greener IT;

Increasing competitiveness in the global business environment: More effective com-munication and collaboration.

How is Polycom championing the best of UC by itself and through its partnerships with companies such as Microsoft?A: Polycom is working with the leading unified communications platform providers to deliver applications that cut across different envi-ronments. Currently our strategic Polycom Open Collaboration Network partners include Avaya, BroadSoft, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, and Siemens. We also have a larger network of ARENA partners who enhance the range and variety of unified communications Polycom is able to offer our customers.

Polycom is also a founding member of the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) – a non-profit alliance of world-wide technology leaders joining together to deliver open UC solutions to customers and address the challenge of integrating new and existing systems to support more productive and efficient workflows.

Polycom and its partners are able to provide an open and interoperable collaboration solu-tion that gives customers greater flexibility and investment protection for their UC envi-ronment, across the large enterprise as well as the SMB segment.

Polycom has also recently signed a multi-year, strategic global agreement with Microsoft Corp. to deliver integrated end-to-end unified communications and to improve customers’ business productivity.

This agreement is a major step towards streamlining communications across mes-saging, video and voice with connected appli-cations and devices.

Under the agreement, Polycom plans to develop and market standards-based UC solutions – encompassing software, hard-ware, networking and services – that span the enterprise, small-to-medium business, and government markets; and will enable cus-tomers to improve business productivity and reduce travel, telecom and IT operating costs.

Polycom and Microsoft share a vision for business productivity solutions built on

Intelligent Core as their foundation, organisa-tions benefit from “location liberation,” so that people can have more engaging conversa-tions in new ways that defy the boundaries of distance, cost, time and business disruptions. Through highly visual and immersive com-munication experiences, people can connect, speed decision making and raise productivity in highly effective ways that benefit companies and individuals anywhere.

Some of the key features that an organisation must look for in a UC solution are:

Open standards collaboration Easy-to-use and deploy UC solutions ( e.g.

touch screen) Scalable conferencing bridges

HD video and audio endpoints that deliver life-like experience

“OUR TIE UP WITH MICROSOFT IS A MAJOR STEP TOWARDS STREAMLINING COMMUNICATIONS ACROSS MESSAGING, VIDEO AND VOICE.”

standards-based platforms that work with the tools and applications people know and use today.

What desirable features should an organi-sation look for in selecting a UC solution?A: The key to a successful UC deployment starts at the core of the network, which must be intelligent, scalable, resilient and open in order to meet the needs of the business now and in the future. The Polycom UC Intelligent Core gives organisations the flexibility and freedom to communicate over HD voice and video, anywhere, anytime, and supports the deepest native integration and interoperability with leading UC network platforms, for a truly open UC environment. With the Polycom UC

Immersive telepresence systems Management applications and global sup-

port infrastructure Integration with their existing multi-

vendor communication An infrastructure that is scalable, flexible

and supports the needs of the business, deliv-ering the highest return on investment with the lowest total cost of ownership



Three Cloud Benefits: Lowering costs, making IT agile and removing undifferentiated heavy lifting from data centres.

D R. WE RN E R VO G E L S A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS



DR. WERNER VOGELS | AMAZON.COM

Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer, Amazon.com in an interview with Ashwani Mishra shares his views on the architecture behind Amazon Web Services, the adoption of cloud computing and key issues and trends around it.

How did Amazon Web Services come into being

and what is the nature of the IT architecture used to offer services to enterprise users?The emergence of Amazon Web Servic-es came out of our own need at Ama-zon.com to build a scalable and reliable platform that helped our engineers to be more innovative and effective.

For many years Amazon Web Ser-

vices has been working on various scalable and reliable IT solutions and techniques. We supported Amazon.com’s business in several countries and built an e-commerce enterprise services platform. On this platform we have customers such as Marks and Spencer, Target.com and Timex running their e-commerce applica-tions. The technologies needed for such companies were on a much

larger scale than even Amazon.com.We organised our IT structure

internally by using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The model was built on an agile development meth-odology. So if we wanted to add inno-vation within our environment we created a small team that was given the task of developing a new service. We have around 300 to 400 such ser-vices right now.

of thePrivateBeware

Cloud

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So was this platform the pre-cursor to becoming a new

business model for the company to offer services in the cloud?Yes. It was not only the architecture but the manner in which it was organised internally. Each of these services had a dedicated team associ-ated with it. The developers were themselves responsible for the oper-ations and innovation. These teams had an assignment to improve the services continuously.

During this time, we realised that we could do better. We did a deep dive and felt that all of these teams were working on similar issues, especially on the infrastructure front. Seventy percent of their time was being spent on managing infrastructure including storage, allocating and managing resources, managing databases, carrying out data replication, built fault-toler-ance for multiple data centres, and managing networks.

We realised that we were allow-ing duplication of work to happen purely because of speed of execu-tion. We decided to place this in a shared services platform so that the teams could become more effec-tive. By dropping the infrastructure pieces into the shared services model, our engineers became more effective. With shared services our people focused 70 percent of their time on innovation. This was a turnaround for us.

This was the time when we decided to open this as a service for enterprises who wanted to innovate and focus on business, rather than worry on capex and opex costs.

How do you envision enterprises making a

transition to the cloud?There is some skepticism as of today but as more education happens around the cloud computing model, enterprises will become comfortable with it. However, we do see many enterprises across the globe being aggressive in deployment.

model is another area that is becom-ing quite popular for many enter-prises. The cloud is getting these enterprises to change the way they conduct their DR in terms of rigour and continuity and ensuring that business goes on as usual.

In the long term, CIOs will look at their internal IT systems to be cloud ready and build features such as automation. They will also have to look at the IT dependencies of vari-ous applications and what would be the cost of bringing such applications onto the cloud. For example, if the CRM license of a company expires next year, they can either renew the license or place it on the cloud or go for SaaS. So there is a range of options available to CIOs today.

Many technology service providers have hyped up the

private cloud. You term it a "false

If I look at a very-large-enterprise CIO, who is responsible for more than a thousand applications; it is obvious that he will not move all his applications overnight onto the cloud. According to me such CIOs would have an immediate strategy and a long term strategy for cloud transition.

The immediate strategy would focus on anything that has to do with scale and where they need to control the costs. This would involve moving applications such as marketing, and campaigning to the cloud. These will be the obvious choices.

In parallel, they will be starting proof-of-concepts to learn more about the cloud. They might then move their test and development environment and this will be a pre-cursor to moving their production environment.

Disaster Recovery (DR) in a cloud

CIOs will have

an immediate

strategy and

long-term

strategy for cloud

adoption.

Standards will

not become an

obstacle in cloud

acceptance.

There will be a

change in cloud

licensing model.

THINGS I BELIEVE IN

A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS D R . WE RN E R VO G E L S



cloud." What are the issues surrounding the private cloud?Enterprises are not asking for private clouds, it is the service providers who are telling them what they should do.

Take the analogy between the electricity grid and cloud model. In the beginning of the last century many enterprises ran their businesses using generators. When public electricity was introduced, these businesses couldn’t just dump their generators and

same burden that he carried before -- man-aging reliability, maintenance and so on. I think that private cloud doesn’t have the right to be called a cloud model.

Would you agree that interoperability and well-defined

standards hold the key to broad adoption of cloud computing?The way things are going, I do not think standards are an obstacle for the cloud adop-

power of control. We have various partners such as CA, BMC Software and more that work with us for our cloud offerings.

Security has been one of the concerns and on a global level it is hard just to say ‘trust me.’ At Amazon Web Services, we sit down with CIOs and the CISOs of companies and look at their current practices. We then look at the security properties that the cloud can offer and whether we can match them. The cloud has isolation models, access control mechanisms similar to what many enter-prises have on-premise.

To be honest, I have yet to witness a situation where after such a conversation, the CIO or the CISO said that the security was insufficient in the cloud. The Federal government in the U.S. decided to move to the cloud as they wanted to deliver better services for the citizens. They launched one of their sites called recovery.org that tracks stimulus spending on the Amazon cloud. The government put out a release stating that our security in the cloud model was better than what they could achieve themselves.

How do you see the adoption of the cloud model in the next one year?

It is hard to predict where it will go in the next one year. Each year has been a surprise for us in the cloud space. There will be a change in enterprise licensing models. IT service providers are starting to realise that if they do not start listening to their custom-ers, they will lose out.

Licenses come for five to ten years if users want a discount. The whole discount busi-ness is murky. Everybody knows the huge price tags that come with the ERP systems and they also know that nobody is paying that amount. So does one want to commit for ten years to get the best deal? In the cloud, you pay for what you use. It is clear and transparent.

I see the cloud model becoming con-sumer driven. Just like we have no brand loyalty in the consumer world of technology gadgets and applications, the same will be true for the cloud as well. CIOs want control of their IT infrastructure and meet business expectations. So we will see a move towards richer applications, integration with more consumer style IT applications; and all of these will be driven by cloud services.

“The cloud is getting these enterprises to change the way they conduct their DR in terms of rigour and continuity and ensuring that business goes on as usual.”

go on the public network. They took their time to realise that it was secure, reliable and their business could run on it and that’s when they started the transition.

In this story there was one set of people who were unhappy and they were the gen-erator manufacturers. They wanted their generators to be sold. So they kept telling enterprises that they should not only keep the generators they owned but also buy more and become independent public util-ity companies.

Coming back to the cloud model, I think the cloud is defined by benefits, and the three important benefits are lowering costs, making IT agile and removing undifferenti-ated heavy lifting by off-loading data centre operations.

In the case of a private cloud, it has none of these benefits. It doesn’t lower costs as one still needs to pay for resources; it will scale over again as demands need to be met, which means that there is no reduction in operational costs.

It doesn’t improve your agility as the resources are not infinite and there are constraints. So a CIO will end up having the

tion. Previously software applications were complex as many customers found them-selves locked-in with a particular service provider. The only way they could achieve freedom from such complexities was through the presence of standards.

We believe that one should not lock customers into any particular technol-ogy. Enterprises should have the choice of using any services that they want to use. So if an enterprise is using our compute services, they are not obliged to use our storage service. They have the freedom to use it from another service provider. Also having simple application interfaces, it becomes easy for enterprises to move from one provider to another.

Will there be standards in the future? Maybe. What is Amazon

Web Services doing to address the big worries around management and security in cloud computing? Automation is an important concept in the cloud for management of services. Here services are not just big software packets but come equipped with APIs that give the

—Dr. Werner Vogels , CTO, Amazon.com

22 07 OCTOBER 2010CTOFORUM THE CHIEF


BEST OF

BREED

Since joining Egenera, I've been champion-ing what's now being termed Converged Infrastructure (aka unified computing). It's an exciting and important part of IT manage-ment, demonstrated by the fact that all major

vendors are offering some form of the technology. But it sometimes takes a while for folks (my analyst friends included) to get their heads around understanding it.

Converged InfrastructureGet your head around the concepts and problems of unified computing. BY KEN OESTREICH

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Ken Oestreich is VP of Product Marketking with Egenera.

ABOUT AUTHOR

PART 1: What is Converged Infrastructure, and how it will change data centre managementConverged Infrastructure and Unified Computing are both terms referring to technology where the complete server profile, including I/O (NICs, HBAs, KVM), networking (VLANs, IP load balancing), and storage connectivity (LUN mapping, switch control)

COMPANIES SURVEYED SAID THAT CONVERGED INFRASTRUC-TURE IS NOT ATTRACTIVE TO THEM

54%DATA BRIEFING

2307 OCTOBER 2010CTO FORUMTHE CHIEF


T E CH N O LO GY B E S T O F BR E E D

are all abstracted and defined/configured in software. The result is a pooling of phys-ical servers, network resources and storage resources that can be assigned on-demand. This approach lets IT operators rapidly re-purpose servers or entire environments without having to physically reconfigure I/O components by hand, and without the requirement of hypervisors. It massively reduces the quantity and expense of the physical I/O and networking components as well as the time required to configure them. A converged infrastructure approach offers an elegant, simple-to-manage approach to data centre infrastructure administration.

From an architectural perspective, this approach may also be referred to as a com-pute fabric or Processing Area Network. Because the physical CPU state is com-pletely abstracted away, the CPUs become stateless and therefore can be reassigned extremely easily creating a “fabric” of com-ponents, analogous to how SANs assign logical storage LUNs. Through I/O virtu-alisation, both data and storage transports can also be converged, further simplifying the physical network infrastructure down to a single wire.

The result is a ‘wire-once’ set of pooled bare-metal CPUs and network resources that can be assigned on demand, defining their logical configurations and network connections instantly. There is another nice resource: A white-paper commissioned by HP, executed by Michelle Bailey at IDC. In it she defines a converged system:

The term converged system refers to a new set of enterprise products that package server, storage, and networking architectures together as a single unit and utilise built-in service-oriented management tools for the pur-pose of driving efficiencies in time to deployment and sim-plifying ongoing operations. Within a converged system, each of the compute, storage, and net-work devices are aware of each other and are tuned for higher performance than if constructed in a purely modular architecture. While a converged system may be constructed of modular

components that can be swapped in and out as scaling requires, ultimately the entire system is integrated at either the hardware layer or the software layer.

A Converged Infrastructure is different from, but analogous to, hypervisor-based server virtualisation. Think of hypervisors as operating ‘above’ the CPU, abstracting software (applications and O/S) from the CPU; think of a Converged Infrastructure as operating ‘below’ the CPU, abstracting network and storage connections. However, note that converged Infrastructure doesn't operate via a software layer the way that a hypervisor does. Converged Infrastructure is possible whether or not server virtualisa-tion is present. Converged Infrastructure and server virtual-isation can complement each other produc-ing significant cost and operational benefits. For example, consider a physical host failure where the entire machine, network and storage configuration needs to be replicated on a new physical server. Using Converged Infrastructure, IT Ops can quickly replace the physical server using a spare ‘bare-met-al’ server. A new host can be created on the fly, all the way down to the same NIC, HBA

and networking configurations of the original server. A Converged Infrastructure can re-create a physical server (or vir-tual host) as well as its network-ing and storage configuration on any ‘cold’ bare-metal server. In addition, it can re-create an entire environment of servers using bare-metal infrastructure at a different location as well. Thus it is particularly well-suited to provide both high-availability

(HA) as well as Disaster Recovery (DR) in mixed physical/virtual environments, eliminating the need for complex clustering

solutions. In doing so, a single Converged Infrastructure system can replace numer-ous point-products for physical/virtual server management, network management, I/O management, configuration manage-ment, HA and DR.

CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE - Simplifying Management for ‘The other half’ of the Data centreIn the manner that server virtualisation has grown to become the dominant data centre management approach for software, con-verged infrastructure is poised to become the dominant management approach for ‘the other 50 percent’ of the data centre – its infrastructure. However adoption will take place gradually, for a few reasons:

IT can only absorb so much at once. Most often, converged infrastructure is consumed after IT has come up the maturity curve after having cut their teeth on OS virtualisa-tion. Once that initiative is under way, IT then begins looking for other sources of cost take-out... and the data centre infrastructure is the logical next step.

Converged infrastructure is still relatively new. While the market considers OS virtu-alisation to be relatively mature, converging infrastructure is less-well understood.

But there is one universal approach that can overcome these hesitations -- money. So, in my next installment, I'll do a deeper dive into the really fantastic economics and cost take-out opportunities of converging infrastructure...

PART 2. Converged Infrastructure’s Cost AdvantagesLet me go a bit deeper and explain the source of capital and operational improvements con-verged Infrastructure offers – and why it’s such a compelling opportunity to pursue.

20%FIND CONVERGED

INFRASTRUCTURE

ATTRACTIVE

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EQUIPMENT COSTS

Server Virtualisation Converged Infrastructure

Logically Abstracts Software Infrastructure HW

Portablility for Software Infrastructure

Agility of Software I/O, network & storage

Logical Provisioning of Servers Infrastructure

Consolidates Virtual Servers I/O & networking

Eliminates Over-provisioned servers NICs and HBAs

Converged Infrastructure and Software Virtualisation

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First, the most important distinction to make between converged infrastructure and ‘the old way of doing business’ is that management – as well as the technology – is also converged. Consider how many point-products you currently use for infrastruc-ture management.

This diagram below has resonated with customers and analysts alike. It highlights, albeit in a stylised fashion, just how many point-products an average-sized IT depart-ment is using. This results in clear impact in Operational complexity – coordinating

tool use, procedures, interdependencies and fault-tracking Operational cost – the raw expense it costs

to acquire and then annually maintain them Capital cost – if you count all of the sepa-

rate hardware components they’re trying to manage

That last bullet, the thing about hardware components, is also something to drill down into. Because every physical infrastructure component in the ‘old’ way of doing things has a cost. I mean I/O components like NICs and HBAs, not to mention switches, load balancers and cables. What might be possible if you could vir-tualise all of the physical infrastructure components, and then have a single tool to manipulate them logically?

Well, then you’d be able to throw-out rough-ly 80 percent of the physical components (and the associated costs) and reduce the opera-tional complexity roughly the same amount.

In the same way that the software domain has been virtualised by the hypervisor, the infrastructure world can be virtualised with I/O virtualisation and converged network-ing. Once the I/O and network are now virtualised, they can be composed/recom-posed on demand. This eliminates a large number of components needed for infra-structure provisioning, scaling, and even failover/clustering (more on this later). If you can now logically re-define server and infrastructure profiles, you can also create simplified disaster recovery tools too.

In all, we can go from roughly a dozen point-products down to just 2-3 (see diagram below). Now: What’s the impact on costs?

On the capital cost side, since I/O is consolidated, it literally means fewer NICs and elimination of most HBAs since they can be virtualised too. Consolidating I/O

also implies converged transport, meaning fewer cables (typically only 1 per server, 2 if teamed/redundant). A converged trans-port also allows for fewer switches needed on the network. Also remember that with few moving (physical) parts, you also have to purchase few software tools and licens-es. See diagram on facing page. On the operational cost side, there are the benefits of simpler management, less on-the-floor maintenance, and even less power consumption. With fewer physical components and a more virtual infrastruc-ture, entire server configurations can be created more simply, often with only a sin-gle management tool. That means creating and assigning NICs, HBAs, ports, address-es and world-wide names. It means creat-ing segregated VLAN networks, creating and assigning data and storage switches. And it means automatically creating and assigning boot LUNs. The server configu-ration is just what you’re used to – except it’s defined in software, and all from a single unified management console. The result: Buying, integrating and maintain-ing less software.

Ever wonder why converged infrastruc-ture is developing such a following? It’s because physical simplicity breeds opera-tional efficiency. And that means much less sustained cost and effort. And an easier time at your job.

PART 3: Converged Infrastructure: What it Is, and What it Isn'tIn my two earlier posts, I first took a stab at an overview of converged infrastructure and how it will change IT management, and in the second installment, I looked a bit closer at converged infrastructure's cost advantages. But one thing that I sense I neglected was to define what's meant by converged infrastructure (BTW, Cisco terms it Unified Computing). Even more important, I also feel the need to highlight what converged infrastructure is not. Plus, there are vendor instances where The Emperor Has No Clothing -- e.g. where some marketers have claimed that they suddenly have converged infra-structure where the fact remains that they are vending the same old products. Why splitting hairs in defining terms? Because true converged infrastructure /

Physical simplicity breeds operational efficiency. That means much less sustained cost and effort. And an easier time at your job.

App

Hypervisor/OS

NetworkSwitching

NetworkI/O

StorageI/O

StorageSwitching

CPU

VM Server Management

IP Load Balancing

Software Provisioning

Physical HA and Clustering

Virtual HA

Infrastructure Provisioning

Device Failover

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Network Management

Physical Server Management

Storage Connection Management

I/O Management

Point-products being used by an average-sized IT department

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unified computing has architectural, oper-ational, and capital cost advantages over traditional IT approaches. (AKA Don't buy the used car just because the paint is nice)

Defining terms - in the public domainObviously, it can't hurt to see how the ven-dors self-describe the offerings... here goes: Cisco's Definition (via webopedia) "...simplifies traditional architectures and dramatically reduce the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured in the data centre. The Cisco Unified Computing System is a next-generation data centre plat-form that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation into a cohesive system..." Egenera's Definition "A technology where CPU allocation, data I/O, storage I/O, network configurations, and storage con-nections are all logically defined and con-figured in software. This approach allows IT operators to rapidly re-purpose CPUs without having to physically reconfigure each of the I/O components and associated network by hand—and without needing a hypervisor." HP's Definition "HP Converged Infra-structure is built on a next-generation IT architecture – based on standards – that combines virtualised compute, storage and networks with facilities into a single shared-services environment optimised for any workload."

Defining terms - by using attributesEmpirically, converged infrastructure needs to have two main attributes (to live up to its name): It should reduce the quantity and complexity of physical IT infrastructure, and it should reduce the quantity and complex-ity of IT operations management tools. So let's be specific:

Ability to reduce quantity and complexity of physical infrastructure: virtualise I/O, reducing physical I/O com-ponents (e.g. eliminate NICs and HBAs) leverage converged networking, reduc-ing physical cabling and eliminating re-cabling reduce overall quantity of servers, (e.g. ability to use free pools of servers to re-purpose for scaling, failure, disaster recov-ery, etc.)

Ability to reduce quantity and complexity of operations/management tools: be agnostic with respect to the software payload (e.g. O/S independent) fewer point-products, less paging between tool windows (BTW, this is possible because so much of the infrastructure become virtual and therefore more easily logically manipulated) reduce/eliminate the silos of visualising & managing physical vs virtual servers, physical networks vs virtual networks simplified higher-level services, such as providing fail-over, scaling-out, replica-tion, disaster recovery, etc.

To sum-up so far, if you're shopping for this stuff, you need to a) Look for the ability to virtualise infra-structure as well as software b) Look for fewer point products and less windowing c) Look for more services (e.g. HA, DR) baked-into the product. Beware.... when the Emperor Has No Clothes...In closing, I'll also share my pet peeve: When vendors whitewash their products to fit the latest trend. I'll not name names, but beware of the following stuff labeled ‘con-verged infrastructure’: If the vendor says ‘Heterogeneous Auto-mation’ - that's different. For example, it

could easily be scripted run-book automa-tion. This doesn't reduce physical com-plexity in the least. If the vendor says ‘Product Bundle, single SKU’ - Same as above. ‘Shrink wrapped’ does not equal ‘converged’ If the vendor says ‘Pre-Integrated’ - This may simplify installation, but does not guarantee physical simplicity nor opera-tional simplicity. Thanks for reading the series so far. I'm

pondering a fourth-and-final installment on where this whole virtualisation and con-verged infrastructure thing is taking us - a look at possible future directions.

— Ken Oestreich is a marketing and product

management veteran in the enterprise IT and

data centre space, with a career spanning

start-ups to established vendors.Ken currently

works as Vice President - Product Marketing at

Egenera.

This article is published with prior permission

from www.infosecisland.com.

App

Hypervisor/OS

NetworkSwitching

NetworkI/O

StorageI/O

StorageSwitching

CPU

VM Server Management

IP Load Balancing

Software Provisioning

Physical HA & Clustering

Virtual HA

Infrastructure Provisioning

Device Failover

DR/ COOP Systems

Configuration Systems

Network Management

Physical Server Management

Storage Connection Management

I/O Management

Single, Logical Control

Simple,logical

re-definition

Converged transport reduces the number of switches



In the not-so-distant future, no one will use cheques. Reserve Bank of India's efforts, to make the RTGS and NEFT processes as com-mon as cheques are today, are paying off, and increasingly, banks are offering their customers innovative payment services that are faster, cheaper and safer for all concerned.

There are still many processes that require manual intervention that can be eliminated to make payments even more faster, cheaper and safer, as a project at ING Vysya Bank demonstrates. Everyday, as customers initiate payments via the Real-Time Gross Settlement and/or the National Elec-tronic Fund Transfer routes, an army of bank employees is needed across the nation to manually match all the requisite information against their banks' databases to ensure that the money changes the right hands. At ING Vysya, an important step in this process is now automated.

Pay-By-Wire Turbo-Charged

CASE STUDY | ING VYSYA BANK

CHALLENGE: Through INNOVATION and some SERIOUS CODING, ING Vysya Bank has made DOMESTIC PAYMENTS via the RTGS-NEFT route speedier and more accurate. In a TIGHTER REGULATORY REGIME, such IT-led business innovations are boosting the bank's ability to make money from information.



CA S E S T U DY B E S T O F BR E E D

An Opportunity"Our research leads us to believe that we are now the fastest domestic electronics payments processor in the country," said Dharmaraj Ramakrishnan, Head - Core Banking at ING Vysya. "As India rapidly modernises and cheque-based transactions yield to NEFT and RTGS, our transformational initiative will position us well," he said.

What became an IT-led business transformation actu-ally started off in a small way as an infrastructure capacity augmentation exercise at the planning stage, Ramakrish-nan said. "We took it to the next level of business transfor-

mation and operational excellence."In 2008 the bank took stock of its payment platforms

even as it saw that the RBI’s persistent efforts to move from cheque-based payments to RTGS/NEFT would soon start getting traction in the market. While this would benefit individuals with small and large transactions alike, the true impact of what Ramakrishnan and his colleagues eventually developed would be seen in the corporate sector, making the bank 'Easy To Deal With' as ING's motto goes.

On the one hand, the bank felt the need to re-architect its domestic electronics payment infrastructure and on the other "we also sensed an opportunity to put together a world-class solution that would offer the best of services to our customers," Ramakrishnan said. What the IT team also did was to de-link volume growth from payment-operations-related FTE growth.

The objective was to build the fastest domestic wire transfer facility in the Indian banking industry.

As banking products and services get commoditized, speed and excellence of service channels become key dif-ferentiators, Ramakrishnan said in a background note on the project. India is rapidly modernizing and banking payment services are switching from physical cheques to wire transfer. "By building the fastest domestic wire transfer facility in India, ING Vysya now has the ability to differentiate itself to both retail and corporate customers and be their preferred payment processor," he said.

Money From InformationThe big picture is part of the evolving landscape in the payment scenario, and what is it that various banks and financial institutions can do to innovate with the rapid changes happening in the indusry today. "This is charac-terised by the decline of float-based income," said Anirud-dha Paul, Head, IT Change Delivery, Ramakrishnan's boss and an enthusiastic champion of various 'change-the-bank' initiatives that would put ING Vysya on par with larger competitors for lucrative corporate customers. "The chances of making money out of money are declining and the only way you can make money is by leveraging infor-mation," Paul likes to say.

The decline of cheques and other such instruments and the inexorable shift towards electronic payments both in retail banking and with corporate customers is setting the agenda. "Against this background what we find is a sharply increasing numbers electronic transactions in the domestic market with tightening regimes from RBI on the kind of fees that we can charge to the customer," Paul said. For instance three years back there was a much looser regime on the fees that a bank could charge a cus-tomer. Now the RBI has clearly laid down the maximum that a bank can charge and there's not much flexibility there, he said.

What ING Vysya is doing then is "building a whole range of payment products and surrounding informa-

ANIRUDDHA PAUL, Head, IT Change Delivery and Dhar-maraj Ramakrishnan, Head - Core Banking at ING Vysya.

COMPANY DASHBOARD

COMPANY:ING Vysya Bank

HEADQUARTER:Bangalore

MD AND CEO:

Shailendra Bhandari

OPERATIONS:

ING Vysya Bank Ltd., is

an entity formed with

the coming together of

erstwhile, Vysya Bank

Ltd, a premier bank

in the Indian Private

Sector and a global

financial powerhouse,

ING of Dutch origin,

during Oct 2002.

PH

OT

O B

Y S

RA

DH

AK

RIS

HN

A



B E S T O F BR E E D CA S E S T U DY

tion systems which can extract, glean, tweak, massage information related to the customer and provide value add to our corporate customers primarily, who are the beneficiaries of these kind of insights and also to various customers," he said.

Payments ProgrammeThe automation of the payee-name validation must be seen in this context. “This was a part of a bigger pro-gramme that aimed improving operational efficiencies,” said Dheepak Rajoo, a project manager with the bank’s Programme Management division who helped manage the two phases of the clutch of projects that eventually led to the successful implementation of the automation.

“We had a payments flavour to it, with the NEFT RTGS, it had an ECS component, an offline clearing process related to cheque processing, a cheque truncation process -- all of this, we pulled together as a payments programme.”

The NEFT RTGS had two phases -- first replicating the NEFT RTGS payment platform within the core banking operation. This was “primary because there were pain points around processing a finite number of transactions alone, which meant that the business capability itself could be hampered to some extent.” Then they thought “why don't we scrap the payment infrastructure, which wasn't scalable and migrate it into our core banking.” This meant creating the functionalities of an external processing engine withing the core banking, which “enhanced our capabilities to process transactions and to scale up,” Rajoo said.

That was the first phase of the project. This also meant that the capabilities had to be extended to about 480 odd branches pan India. The core banking front end was an extension of the same platform, called Profile for Win-dows. “The challenge was to be able to migrate the func-tionality by building it from scratch into the platform.”

Automated Validation“Phase 2 was the more innovative” part of the project, Ramakrishnan said, building the ability for payee-name

“The chances of making money out of money are declining and the ONLY WAY YOU CAN MAKE MONEY IS BY LEVERAGING INFORMATION”—ANIRUDDHA PAULHEAD, IT Change Delivery, ING Vysya Bank.

validation. On inward processes, it was about build-ing processes that would match the name, check the accounts, look for restrictions, match off amounts and execute real-time credit. The result could be that validated customers would get near ‘instant liquidity.’

Typically these projects are what the bank’s IT folks call 'Ops and IT Transformation’ projects. This also meant the project was done across geographies, with people working from Portugal and Poland, and therefore people speaking different languages. This meant that for instance, “we had to use a lot of visual and pictorial aids to get our ideas across with a brilliant programmer from Poland” who had some difficulty with English, Rajoo said.

One of the things they did, was to migrate a payment processing engine that was natively built, called P-Con-nect. “We mirrored the same functionalities into our core banking system.” To be able to build all the native capabil-ity of a legacy software back into the core banking was the objective. “Now we've retired that platform,” he said.

“The external engine had performance issues around scalability, and transaction processing times were extremely high,” Rajoo said. “At one point we had daily monitoring at the CIO level, what was the time for break-fix, what was the downtime, how much time was lost because of the performance issues and so on.”

At the time we were thinking about the concept of a payments programme that had multiple projects -- we had a programme level project governance. That helped to always have a dip-stick every month, with the CIO, the COO and everyone else and validated the idea that 'the replacement was the right way to go' and the decision to move this in to the core banking made sense.

Today, most banks use a manual process to validate payee names. Whenever there is an incoming NEFT-RTGS, there will be a backend operations team that will monitor what time the message came in, what is the account number and perform a series of validations. Large banks can process hundreds of thousands of these transactions. Further RBI has stringent regulations on these transactions.



CA S E S T U DY B E S T O F BR E E D

SPEED: Customer gets instant credit for the wire

transfer as and when it is received by ING. This will

enable the customer to have ready access to the

funds.

SAFETY: Customers accounts are credited only

after payee names are validated and anti-money

laundering (AML) checks done on-the-fly in a

Straight-Through Processing (STP) mode.

SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE: No more

anxious waiting hours and queries to the Bank on

the status of the funds transferred.

COST BENEFITS: There has been a 40 per

cent reduction in actual FTE (full-time employee)

cost and a 75 per cent reduction from projected

FTE costs if this initiative hadn’t been planned

and executed.

The BenefitsREVENUE IMPACT: ING Vysya is position-

ing itself as a significant player in the payments

processing space. This initiative goes a long way in

underpinning our credentials.

METRICS: Handles 2,00,000 transactions/month

and an 84-100 per cent year-on-year growth rate

Outward remittance processing time cut down by

50 per cent (10 minutes to 5 minutes)

Inward remittance processing time cut down by 80

100 per cent (from 1 hour to nearly instantaneous

for 70 per cent cases that go through STP)

At 100 per cent growth rates in business volumes,

the operations staff would have increased from 9

FTE to 20; it has now been resized to just 5 FTE

Straight-Through Processing ensures customers

get instant credit of the wire transfer as and when it

is received by ING Vysya.

Error-free processing due to STP and implemen-

tation of maker-checker concept for high value

transactions.

Improved availability of systems across the branch

network and online channels.

PARTICULAR ATTENTION WAS PAID TO:

System re-architecture and automation. This was

a mammoth analysis, programming and testing

effort. Payment processors are the most sensitive

areas of operations and ING Vysya had to design

fail-safe systems that would work flawlessly from day

one. In particular, the fuzzy logic algorithms had to

be suitable for Indian conditions and Indian names.

Since payee-name validation was at the heart of STP,

they had to get this absolutely right.

NEFT meant the transaction has to be real-time. That meant that the bank has to keep ramp-ing up its backend as the transaction volume increased, to be able to settle customer transac-tions the same day. For instance, even if a trans-fer is initiated at 4 p.m. when the cut off is 5 p.m. the transfer still has to be made the same day. The more the volume the more the number of people required at the backend.

“We automated it,” Ramakrishnan said. “We built an algorithm, which matches off the spelling as well as the way the name sounds.” The algorithm matches off the spelling and gives it a percentage value and also matches off the sound and gives it a value. The operations team can configure the rules that determine the degree of matching for which a straight-through process can be allowed, he said.

Bedrock of Future Innovation“This particular innovation that we have done, which is building from a domestic electronic payments system would be the bedrock of further innovation that we have to do,” Paul said. In the payments and cash management space on the corporate banking side, the bank has a num-ber of innovative products that it has soft-launched, sold out or is on the verge of completing installations.

For instance, this could be about telling a corporate cus-tomer who relies on inward NEFT based RTGSs from the vendor eco-system that “not only will we be able to pro-cess his payments the fastest in the country, but we also have mechanisms and systems that allow us to include

the invoice details” that the vendor network is using to pay to the bank’s corporate customer.

For example, take a corporate with say 5,000 dealers across the country. The dealer would make a payment and ask for delivery. Under nor-mal circumstances, the dealer would have made a payment, taken the details about the payment, called up the corporate about the payment.

For anyone with a corporate network and a ven-dor network, “we are offering to the vendor as well as to the corporate customer, make the payment, include some information, passing the information and processing it and informing the corporate ERP in a straight-through process is something that we can eminently do.”

Otherwise the vendor would have waited for confirmation of the payment, sent it to the corporate, who would have dou-ble checked, waited for the invoice details, and then would have processed the delivery. Clearly there would have been many days gap between the vendor making the payment and the corporate processing the delivery to the vendor.

“With our systems, not only do you make the core pay-ment faster but the surrounding systems kick in to get the information about the payment and automatically post it to the corporate ERP systems in an straight-through pro-cess,” Paul said.

Such innovations, along with others such as offering greater security for a payment, are helping ING Vysya Bank go after lucrative large corporate customers who were hitherto more the domain of large multinational banks, he said. —Harichandan Arakali

480BRANCHES ARE

SERVICED BY THE

SYSTEM ACROSS

THE COUNTRY.

30 07 NOVEMBER 2010CTO FORUM THE CHIEF


UnlockingKnowledge& Wisdom in the EnterpriseInformation is not everything, it is of use to the organisation only if it is actionable. By Daniel Burrus

130THE NUMBER OF FRIENDS AN AVERAGE FACEBOOK USER HAS, IT WAS 120 LAST YEAR

Every company has both information and knowl-edge. What’s the difference? Knowledge is some-thing that’s actionable and that generates value for the receiver; it’s dynamic and causes action. Information, on the other hand, is static and is not actionable. It’s simply compiled data.

For example, if you received a list of all the sand-wich shops in your state, you’re now informed,

but you don’t have any real knowledge of how to make a sandwich. However, if someone showed you how to create a great sandwich that tastes better than any other sandwich you’ve ever had, you now have something actionable. The person shared with you some knowledge based on his or her experience. You can go home and recreate that sandwich again. That’s knowledge.

The good news is that knowledge increases in value when it’s shared. Think about it … have you ever learned from a co-worker? A customer? A stranger in the coffee shop? Of course you have. But you didn’t learn by giving the other person basic information. More than likely, you were in a dialog. You shared your knowledge and they shared theirs. In the process, you both learned something new and valuable.



U N LO CK I N G K N OWL E D G E COVE R S TORY

1,000,000,000,000APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF UNIQUE URLS IN GOOGLE’S INDEX

CRORE NUMBER OF TWEETS TO DATE ON TWITTER

29.5

78

500

MILLION

MILLION

NUMBER OF VISITORS WIKIPEDIA ATTRACTS MONTHLY AS OF JANUARY 2010. THERE ARE MORE THAN 91,000 ACTIVE CONTRIBUTORS WORKING ON MORE THAN 16,000,000 ARTICLES.

APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF ACTIVE USERS CURRENTLY ON FACEBOOK.EVERY MINUTE,

24HOURS OF VIDEO IS UPLOADED TO YOUTUBE

COVE R S TORY U N LO CK I N G K N OWL E D G E



Knowing that knowledge sharing is valuable, it makes sense to capture and lever-age knowledge in your organisation. But how do you do that? Putting knowl-edge in a file cabinet or on a hard drive isn’t enough. You need to have your compa-ny’s knowledge on your net-work so it can be accessed anytime, anywhere, and via

any device. People need to be able to not only view the knowledge, but also add to it and utilise it. That’s how knowledge evolves, stays relevant, and gets more valuable.

Additionally, realise that organisations today are facing a major knowledge drain crisis. Approximately 78 mil-lion Baby Boomers in the United States are headed for retirement. When they leave, they’re going to take all the knowledge and wis-dom that’s in their head with them. Unfortunately, no one can change the fact that so many people will be retiring. But you can decide whether the retirees in your company are going to take their knowledge with them or if you’re going to capture it.

Knowing all this, it makes sense to devel-op knowledge sharing networks within your organisation. The question is, how do you create one?

IT ALL STARTS WITH THE CIOHarnessing the knowledge within your organisation can’t happen without the CIO’s involvement. Why? Because one of the key tasks for the CIO and the IT department is to create new added value and competi-tive advantages for the organisation. That’s precisely what a knowledge-sharing network delivers. The only way knowledge sharing can work organisationally is by putting it on a network.

In order to create a knowledge base con-taining the collective knowledge within the organisation, you need networks that allow for instant access to the knowledge that’s gathered. A working, dynamic, real-time knowledge base is more powerful than any database or information base.

For centuries, knowledge sharing has been done on a small scale without technol-ogy, such as when people hang out around the water cooler, have casual lunches togeth-er, or go to a meeting. It’s during these times that people share lessons learned and best practices.

Unfortunately, such meetings are sporadic or only last a short time. Additionally, only a limited number of people receive the knowl-edge. And since it’s not captured, there’s no way for people to continually access the knowledge that was shared. But the CIO can put the company’s knowledge into a dynamic state by using simple networking technology. Capturing and leveraging intel-lectual assets is an area where the CIO can

be highly strategic and can add value to the organisation in ways no other executive can.

Knowing how vital your role as the CIO is to creating a knowledge base, it’s time to start getting people involved with the process. Again, your role is to

drive the initiative and spearhead the pro-cess and technology. Others in your organi-sation can set up a means to pull knowledge out of people.

HERE’S HOW: Knowledge Pull - There was a movement in the 1990s to capture knowledge that resided inside organisations, but few had luck with it. Most of the knowledge they were sharing was really just information, and many com-panies made the sharing process too time consuming and complex. To make knowl-edge-sharing work, you need to engage in a process I call “knowledge pull", where you pull the knowledge out of people.

First, realise that all knowledge needs both context and content. For example, a good storyteller can’t just give you the punch line. They have to set it up first by giving you context -- the punch line that fol-lows is the content. The same is true with your knowledge pull approach. You have to get people talking or writing about the con-text before the content has any meaning.

So let’s suppose you have a sales team and you want to pull knowledge from them. To

Unfortunately, human nature is to horde and pro-tect knowledge because we think we only have a certain amount of knowledge in our head. If this were true, then we’d certainly want to covet it dearly. In reality, each per-son is a fountain of knowl-edge and new ideas based on personal experiences, meaning the knowledge well is deep and won’t run dry. Additionally, when you share your knowledge, you don’t lose it.

Think of it like this: Suppose you’re in a large, dark room with hundreds of other people. Everyone in the room is holding an unlit candle, except for you -- you have the only lit candle. Your lone candle provides the only glimmer of light. What happens when you walk over to someone holding one of the unlit candles and light it with your flame? The room is brighter, yet you don’t lose your initial flame. What happens when you use your flame to light another candle, and then another, and then another, and so on? Do you still have your original flame? Yes. Only now the room is more brightly lit because you shared your flame.

The same thing happens when you share knowledge. You still have your ideas, but by sharing them with someone else, you have the potential to improve those ideas well beyond what you previously thought possible. You make the ideas glow a little brighter. That’s why knowledge sharing is so powerful.

RATE OF INCREASE OF PHOTO UPLOADS

TO FACEBOOK.

100%

4BILLION

NUMBER OF IMAGES FLICKR APPROXIMATELY

NOW HOSTS

YOUTUBE EXCEEDS 2 BILLION VIEWS A DAY – NEARLY DOUBLE THE AUDIENCE OF ALL 3 MAJOR US BROADCAST NETWORKS COMBINED.


“Managing knowledge in our business requires innovative approaches that include

management, HR and IT solutions working

together. It is as much a change management challenge as it is an IT challenge.”



begin, you’d set up an internal secure sales force knowledge base that all the salespeople have access to. This is called creating a community of practice, meaning that all the people who have a common profession come here to share knowledge. You can also create a community of practice for your HR team, your accountants, your engineers, etc. Communities of practice can be for virtu-ally any group of people you have in your organisation.

Then, you ask the community of practice for two short paragraphs each month. Why only two paragraphs? You don’t want to take a lot of their time. Additionally, the para-graphs you’ll get will be so powerful that you’ll have a lot of knowledge to learn from and act on. If you have 100 people on your sales team, you’re getting 100 knowledge entries a month that’s a lot of knowledge!

The process is very easy. Each paragraph is answering a question. The first is a con-text question, the second is a content ques-tion. Here’s an example of how the ques-tions would work in terms of setting up the context and content:

Question One: “What was the biggest mistake you made last year with a customer?” This sets up the context. Let people know that you only want one short paragraph for a reply.

Question Two: “What did you learn from your mistake?” This is the content; where the real knowledge lies. Again, request just one short paragraph.

To encourage partici-pation, give examples from the company’s executive team, showing the CEO’s, CFO’s, and other C-suite executive’s biggest mis-takes and what they learned from them. After all, if the company leaders won’t share, why should anyone else? But if the top executives are sharing, then everyone else will feel compelled to share as well. The executives’ participation makes the process both “safe” and powerful.

If each of the 100 salespeople posts their

biggest mistake and what they learned from it, you now have 100 bits of knowledge and powerful lessons that you can categorise. Then, the next month, you ask two more questions:

Question One: “What was the most important personal strategy you implement-ed last year?” (Context)

Question Two: “What did it do for you and your customers?” (Content)

Keep doing this two-question approach every month and your company will quickly

have a wealth of action-able knowledge that can be used to rapidly solve problems and spread innovation.

Does anyone lose any of their knowledge by sharing it? No. Does the entire organisa-tion gain exponentially through the knowledge exchange? Yes! And if people leave, due to retirement or other rea-

sons, at least you’ve captured some of their best knowledge instead of letting it all walk out the door. When someone new comes on board, you simply have him or her access the appropriate community of practice knowledge base network and start reading … and contributing.

Even better, you can pull knowledge exter-nally as well as internally. For example, you as the CIO can be in a community of prac-tice with other CIOs in companies similar

to yours. The same concept would work for your CEO, CFO, etc. Even though everyone in the external community of practice would be working for competing companies, the reality is that the power of knowledge shar-ing is more powerful than competition. In fact, when competitors start sharing knowl-edge, they stimulate each other and get bet-ter ideas that each can go back and apply.

Remember, you can create new knowl-edge by sharing existing knowledge. And just gaining the knowledge isn’t enough; you then have to apply it. How you apply knowledge versus how your competitors apply knowledge will likely be very differ-ent and that’s a good thing. That’s how an industry evolves and how innovation occurs. You want to make sure you’re on the leading edge of that evolution and innovation. Shar-ing knowledge is the best way to do that.

Wisdom Pull - Once you get your knowl-edge network growing, you can take it a step further by tapping into your company’s wis-dom and creating a wisdom base.

What is wisdom versus knowledge? Wis-dom is a guiding principle that can usually be expressed in one sentence and that tends to be timeless and cultureless. For example, the saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, has been around for a long time. It’s one powerful sentence that many people use as a guiding principle. If you’ve ever read a quote that resonated with you, it was likely a one-sentence mes-sage that helped guide your thinking.

You can tap into the wisdom your team holds by creating a wisdom base where

—JS Puri CIO, Fortis Hospitals

75MILLION

NUMBER OF USER ACCOUNTS ON TWITTER

CURRENTLY




everyone shares their personal quotes. The process is simple: Tell the different com-munities of practice that you want to start collecting and sharing their guiding prin-ciples. Make it easy. Ask for only one prin-ciple stated in only one sentence a month. If someone can’t articulate their wisdom yet, that’s okay. Allow them to post a quote that contains a guiding principle from someone else for now.

The fact is that each person has a wealth of wisdom inside. However, most people don’t keep track of it, much less write it down. Here’s a great way to start tracking some of the wisdom you share every day: When you’re speaking with someone, every now and then you will say a guiding prin-ciple. When it happens you know it, and you probably wish you could stop and write it down. But if you’re like most people, you don’t want to interrupt the conversation, so you keep talking, thinking you’ll remember that great quote you said later. However, the powerful sentence goes into a part of your brain that’s short-term memory, and unless you write it down immediately, you’ll forget it.

Next time when you’re talking and you say one of your powerful guiding principles, stop and repeat it. By doing so, you’re shift-ing the words into a dif-ferent part of your brain that gives you more time to write it down later. By saying it a second time, you’ve given yourself five to seven hours to write it down before it’s gone. As a side benefit, the listener gets to hear the wisdom again, which helps make it stick in his or her mind too.

Again, everyone is loaded with wisdom. You simply have to pull it from people so everyone can learn and benefit from each other’s experiences.

Time Well Spent - At this point you may be thinking, “This all sounds great, but I’m busy. And everyone in our organisation, from the CEO to the entry level employees, is so busy that I don’t see how we’ll have time for this.”

Yes, you are a busy CIO. And all the people who report to you are busy, as is the CEO and everyone else down the line. But answer this: During the five years before Lehman Brothers disappeared (which sur-prised many people), were all the executives, the CIO, and employees very busy? Yes. But it didn’t help them much, did it? During the five years before General Motors went bank-rupt, were all the executives, the CIO, and employees very busy? Yes. But it didn’t help them much either, did it?

Being busy is not going to help you at all. What is going to help you is taking the time to lever-age technology so you can create business and com-petitive advantage. And that’s exactly what creating a knowledge- and wisdom-sharing network does. This is about taking your most valuable resource -- the knowledge, talent, and wis-dom of the people in your organisation -- and leverag-ing those capabilities in order to bring the organisa-tion to higher profitability and accelerated growth.

Additionally, the time people in your organisation spend answer-ing the two questions per month will save them even more time, making it time well spent. In fact, it’s so crucial that I even suggest you reward the behavior to ensure everyone takes the time to answer the ques-tions. Here’s an extreme example of how to

During a conversa-

tion, Hilal Khan, CIO,

Honda Siel Cars India talk-

ed about classification of

information and initiatives in

knowledge management at

his company.

We classify all the informa-

tion being generated in

the organisation. There

can be various parameters

attached to these clas-

sifications. They include

checks like printing, for-

warding, archiving – this

creates a framework for

controlling the knowledge

flow in the organisation.

Across Honda we have

divided knowledge initia-

tives into four parts:

Education – sensitivity of

the knowledge, communi-

cation and documents.

Classification of Knowl-

edge, communication and

documents

Enablement – Using

various solutions related to

process, discipline, security

and IT enablement

Regular Audit – To

ensure that we are taking

care of information and

knowledge put together the

way we actually wanted.

Knowledge in Automotive Companies

get everyone’s involvement: Tie the comple-tion of the activity to the person’s paycheck. In other words, if they don’t take the time to answer the two questions each month, they don’t get paid. Do you think that would get people motivated to answer two small ques-tions each month? You bet it would. And by doing something that extreme, you’re show-ing everyone that you think that knowledge and wisdom sharing is that important.

By sharing knowledge and wisdom, every-one in your organisation can get smarter faster. As a result, those in your company will generate more and better ideas, develop more meaningful relationships with each other and with customers, and ignite the spark for true innovation and long-term profits.

—Dan Burrus is one of the world’s leading

technology forecasters and business strate-

gists, and is the author of six books, including

the highly acclaimed Technotrends, which has

been translated into over a dozen languages. He

is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a

research and consulting firm that monitors glob-

al advancements in technology driven trends to

help clients better understand how technologi-

cal, social, and business forces are converging

to create enormous, untapped opportunities.

To see more articles on this or any topic affect-

ing IT today, please visit www.cioupdate.com, a

premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT

executives from around the world.

64BILLION OBJECTS CONTAINED IN THE AMAZON S3 CLOUD. ANALYSIS INDICATES A GROWTH OF 4 BILLION S3 OBJECTS PER MONTH.

X X X X X X COVE R S TORY



Social Media and the Knowledge EnterpriseIt is high time that you acknowledged the effect of social media and worked on policies to benefit the enterprise. By Raj Datta

As a young discipline, KM has many definitions and interpretations. Most efforts to date have mis-interpreted knowledge management and equated

it with content or information management. The term "management" brings about an illusion of exercising control and creating defined processes which automatically extracts the knowledge from people and puts it into searchable repositories within a defined taxonomy.

It is believed there is a right way to clas-sify information so that it can be centrally controlled. Most efforts that strategised in this manner did not succeed. The belief was once the intranet repository was built, con-tent management processes and workflow deployed, people would naturally come and use it because it all made sense.

The submitters of content and seekers of content were considered independently and publishing of content happened in discrete steps due to the nature of process-enabled

Human Centricity,

content management. But this approach didn't succeed so easily, in most cases result-ing in failure or lukewarm success and the CXO's running the show lost clout in the process. Their knowledge strategy was not designed for success.

One basic element that was missed was a focus on the human being. Why would someone be willing to take the time and effort to pen their thoughts? Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge is fond of saying "… knowledge can only be volunteered, it can-not be conscripted." Snowden also points out that we know more than we can tell, and we can tell more than we can write down.

Inherently then, people are more comfortable having conversations and dialog as a way of exchang-ing knowledge. And even if we did get the reposi-tories populated using a well defined prescriptive process, the centralised

taxonomy and navigation in the repository could seem unnatural for many seekers of that information—different seekers have different ways of classifying and navigating through information. The basic problem with this model was that the human was treated as a mechanical device, and knowl-edge management was largely a process-driven and prescriptive approach.

WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL MEDIA Enter Web 2.0 and social media. While

the basic technology underlying Web 2.0 has been around for quite some time, its

rise in popularity in recent years has brought it to the attention of business lead-ers. Social networking and collaboration tools on the Web are increasingly used to tap into an explosion of voluntary knowledge shar-ing. This feeds the comfort zone that people have with conversations and discus-

80%COMPANIES USE

LINKEDIN FOR RECRUITMENT




sions through online activity. The unstructured manner in which knowl-

edge is exchanged has quickly built into mammoth repositories such as Wikipedia. What's made the difference is the human is at the epicenter of these systems. In addi-tion to conversing, humans have a need to express themselves, to make friends and build relationships, and learn from others. People express themselves through social networks, mould their own identity, build a sense of belonging, and emote in this virtual space. Social media feels like a liberating tool as opposed to a prescriptive tool.

Beyond such enabling technology, cul-tural shifts in attitude have also fueled this phenomenon towards socialisation. Gen Y'ers are different from Gen X'er's and they are both quite different from Boomers. The ease with which Gen Y'ers are flocking to social media reflects a shift in social atti-tudes. The work style of both Gen X and Y is much more fluid and collaborative, and they don't mind multi-tasking and generating outcomes through self managed teams.

Their ability to multi-task coupled with openness to collaboration means that they are comfortable with things being done piece meal, a bit at a time, through a collec-tive effort. This is true both in their personal and professional lives. Gen Y'ers certainly don't rely as much on the boss for detailed direction and task allocation as previous generations did. Many times the boss has to get out of the way and let the team get the job done.

Gen Y'ers are also much more at ease with diversity, across economic, ethnic, gender, and cognitive-style strata. They are hence easily connecting with other people in other parts of the planet and anyone with a com-mon interest or goal becomes a friend in the online world. They also like exploring and learning new things with an open mind, and are even cultivat-ing their value systems through online interac-tion. From a content perspective, such a shift in behaviour is creat-ing more comfort with unstructured or loosely structured content gen-eration, and a receptive-ness to collaboration.

THE ‘PROSUMER’In this brave new world the separate roles of producers and consumers of knowledge are merging and the age of the “prosumer” is at hand where people collectively generate and consume knowledge and everyone eats their own dog food. Collaborative technolo-gies are allowing people to not only discuss issues and fuel the decision making process through collective gathering of views and opinions, but also create an explicit form of

social memory. For example, people

who are socially involved in the delib-erations for making a decision often have the deep insight into the reasons for making that decision. They have an understanding of each others' viewpoints

and feelings, as well. However, others not directly involved in the decision making process often only get communication of the outcome of the decision and don't have an understanding of what went into the decision making process. There is no evi-dence available to them of what transpired and why. And in today's empowered world, people spring into action only when they truly understand the reasoning underly-ing decisions more thoroughly. By creating an explicit form of social memory online, people can understand the “why” of certain decisions, and even get more involved in the decision making process itself. This applies to not only tactical issues at a project team level, but strategic issues at an organisa-tional level as well.

This significantly improves the quality of information available to people, and clari-fies the context within which people are expected to act, which enhances buy-in, and

Social media has been a real revelation in that fact that it has its aegis at the very core

with professional individuals using these tools for their own personal activity.

Now these media are being deployed increasingly in the enterprise - to build professional

organisation-centric networks and create and share professional content with others both

– in inter and intra organisation terms. Here we look at some of the contemporary social

media tools making waves that could be used in your enterprise.

TWITTEROrganisations are waking

up to some fundamental

positives of Twitter such

as, real-time short com-

munication, instant wide

outreach - of almost

of broadcast ability, IM

integration, and outside-

the-firewall communica-

tion. All of the above are

handy tools for providing

an edge when it comes

to enterprise commu-

nication and interacting

directly with customers.

YAMMERIt is twitter for the enter-

prise. With offerings of

a (core) private, secure

micro-updating system

to create an in-company

network with the abil-

ity to create dedicated

in-house groups as well

Yammer communities.

Additionally it seamlessly

merges with most other

enterprise offerings like

Sharepoint and email, as

well as public social tools

like Google Reader.

LINKEDINWith any enterprise

media platform, security

is always the mandate.

To this end, LinkedIn is

different and hence more

appealing to the enter-

prise as users can be fil-

tered and pre-authorised

based on their e-mail

address. Therefore, enter-

prises can have the capa-

bility of building control

around discussion boards

and link-sharing areas by

e-mail domain.

Social Media in the Enterprise

100MILLION

NUMBER OF ACTIVE MOBILE FACEBOOK

USERS.


“We do not have any policies for social media as yet but we are planning to implement ways that groom an employee personally and professionally, without sacrificing independence.”



creates a common alignment in purpose and direction. Social media then not only allows for conversations, but creates more inclusion overall. This is part of the reason that the open source movement has become so widespread and powerful.

Innovation also is fueled by social net-working. There is a growing opinion that innovation is fueled by an open and col-laborative process which taps into the col-lective know-how of a community to not only come up with ideas, but to collectively transform those ideas into inventions and innovations. The success of the open source movement is a good example of this. Differ-ent people pitch in at different times in the process of creating open source software, balancing diverse collective thinking with collective action. And studies have shown that by creating a community of lead users and allowing them to interact, new demand itself is generated tapping into potential blue oceans.

Customer communities are allowing companies to simply listen and observe and sense trends ahead of time. Innovation, is a largely a social phenomena, and the flat-tening of the world is accelerating the pace through an increased capacity for connect-ing people.

HARNESSING KNOWLEDGESo what does this all mean to the enter-prise whose ability to harness knowledge and build capability is a core strategic issue? They must reconsider and redraft their knowledge strategy for this "2.0" world. From a nuts and bolts perspective, the traditional deployment of centralised content man-agement systems will have to be merged with this newer phenom-ena of community-driven content genera-tion. The process-driven approach has to be merged with a people-driven approach and strategically backed by technology to make it a widespread reality.

A defined path for content management is still needed, but the raw material feed-ing it becomes assembled using collective approaches a bit at a time. White papers

would still get generated based on defined templates, but what would feed it is an increased understanding and availability of thoughts assembled by people in the organi-sation, which is done through a continuous organic movement.

Centrally created taxonomies will be driven by facets and roles of people, and classification through individually generated tags will supplement the organisational view. Providing alternative means for navigation will be necessary. Personalisation and cus-tomisation will become strategically impor-tant in this human-centric approach, and any assessment of technology deployment will necessarily require give higher weight

to these features. Team-ing and collaborative software will have to be deployed allowing people to connect with respect to their project, their job, and their passion.

Beyond this, to get maximum impact from knowledge manage-ment, the leadership of a knowledge enterprise

will need to shift its mental model and start thinking from a sociological and anthropo-logical viewpoint. They will need to observe and perhaps even conduct ethnographic studies to understand the emergent ways of working that humans in self-organised teams have realised. This is especially needed if there are generation gaps between the leader-ship and the rest of the workforce.

To enable higher levels of innovation,

organisational-level knowledge processes will need to be deployed to pickup ideas and opportunity identification arising out of com-munity activity. The knowledge harvesting process will go beyond lessons learned and get focused on sensing trends to become a forward-looking enterprise. Over time, as communities mature, decision-making also will increasingly be delegated to them, and pertinent issues will get funneled to them spontaneously for handling. This will result in more agility in sense-making, decision-making and responsive action.

The enterprise will need to be thought of as a set of social networks both formal and informal, both intentional and emergent, which interact with each other to create organisational capability. These networks will also interact with the outside world over time and create innovation capacity. This is a powerful picture of the future and all that is needed to get started is to think of the human being.

—Raj Datta is VP and chief knowledge officer

at MindTree with global responsibilities for all

aspects of innovation, knowledge sharing, col-

laboration, and reuse. To see more articles on

this or any topic affecting IT today, please visit

www.cioupdate.com, a premier destination

site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT executives from

around the world.

THOUSAND THIRD PARTY APPS ARE AVAILABLE FOR

TWITTER.

50

— Hilal KhanCIO, Honda Siel Cars India

NEXTHORIZONS



AUTHOR SAYS:

To say that confusion reigns over who is responsible for something said in social media is the understatement of the year. In a sad but comedic

squabble over individual vs. corporate respon-sibility, a flurry of finger-pointing ensues only to end in a rash command to the rank and file to just "zip it already".

But “people are going to use social tools for business whether the tools are provided by IT or not,” warned Wendy Steinle, marketing director for Novell Pulse. Yes, for business and for pleasure, the Twitter tweets and Facebook posts still fly from phones and computers all the day long, no matter what an employer has to say about the matter. Sure, a company can give an offending tweeter the boot but that’s a bit like locking the house after the burglar leaves with all your stuff. Sadder still if the offending post breaks compliance and the law-man locks you up for the burglary.

On the other hand, there are those compa-nies that, when faced with a runaway staff of tweeters, let the reins fly and trust the team to arrive safely at the destination. These are typi-cally the companies that hail social media for its marketing value. That approach, however, leads to even more confusion.

A recent global study conducted by the

Reining the Social HorsesHow to keep track of employees' social media usage BY PAM BAKER

PH

OT

O:

PH

OT

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.CO

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“Be prepared to take action if the rules are not followed.”



SO CI A L M E D I A N E X T H OR I ZO N S

activity on social networks including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, www hyperlinks, and your local company email.

NodeXL is a project from the Social Media Research Foundation and is supported by the Microsoft Research External Projects Group. The contributors are a list of notables from Microsoft Research, University of Porto, Uni-versity of Maryland, Stanford University, Cor-nell, Oxford University, Australian National University, and the Illinois Institute of Tech-nology, among others.

But there are ways to do some employee tracking yourself such as “via the proxy server which keeps a lot of usage [data] and, with a bit of light scripting, the connecting IP addresses can be mapped back via Active Directory to the individual user,” said Rakkhi.

From this you can collect stats, he says, such as usage, time spent on average, subsites visited (e.g. Facebook apps and games), and when used (e.g. during lunch and after-hours or during the work day).

“You can then combine with any productiv-ity or other HR issues if you need evidence to put on a performance improvement plan or to terminate, said Rakkhi. “Also name and shame walls of Top 10 Facebook users are effective deterrents.”

Be careful not to go too Big Brother with your efforts, however, as such is counter-productive.

“The most successful enterprise social media deployments are those that strike the right balance between user control and free-flowing collaboration around data,” says Steinle. “Just because you want some level of management over social tools, doesn't mean you have to box yourself into a corner.”

—To see more articles on this or any topic

affecting IT today, please visit www.cioupdate.

com, a premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs,

and IT executives from around the world.

Ponemon Institute and Check Point found that while the majority of IT and IT security practitioners believe employees should be responsible for their social repertoire, the majority of employees “rarely or never” con-sider security in their everyday business com-munications ... bit of a huge, gaping discon-nect there, to say the least.

Further aggravating the situation is the lack of consensus over who in the corporate pyramid should be the Pharaoh of Prelection. In the aforementioned survey, more than half of respondents in the U.S., UK and Australia say the employee should be the most respon-sible party for his or her gaffes but the CISO, corporate IT CIO might have a teeny bit of responsibility too. In contrast, respondents in France believe HR, followed by information security, are most responsible for controlling employees’ social media forays. In Japan, legal followed by corporate IT are viewed as the most responsible parties.

In any case, nobody is in charge most of the time — fine fleck of leadership that is.

Reining it inBut there are a few companies that have successfully harnessed their runaway teams into a quasi-tamed pace. Typically they begin with a strong policy that spells out what can and can’t be discussed in pub-lic and the repercussions if any virtual lips slip. “Just make sure you have usage poli-cies, security guidelines and access rules put in place before you send your employ-ees off to socialise with the company's data,” advises Steinle.

But be prepared to take action if the rules are not followed.

“If the policy is not clear and easily enforced, then the com-pany's efforts to address the risks associated with social networking will be in vain,” said Sam Kol-bert-Hyle, vice president of Busi-ness Development and Strategic Initiatives at Smarsh, a company that provides hosted supervision and archiving solutions for elec-tronic communications.

Enforcement is easier if you are aware that the offense has taken place. To do that, your company needs an arsenal of new tools. They come with a variety of purposes. Monitter, Twitterfall, TweetGrid,

TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite are tools that track conversations, keywords and hashtags on Twitter (some go beyond Twit-ter, too). CoTweet, built specifically for larger organisations, allows multiple people to respond to tweets at the same time.

Trackur and BrandWatch are tools that help companies find anything said by anybody about the company or its products. These tools are generally used for searching for specific message content rather than for specific users.

Companies such as Novell Pulse, Symantec, RSA, Check Point, Zecurion, Identitylogix, Smarsh, and SpectorSoft produce solutions that do everything from enabling compa-nies to review social media postings before employees post to tracking employee usage of social media inside company walls.

“Data loss prevention tools such as Syman-tec Vontu or RSA DLP can give you much more fine-grained control over what informa-tion users post to Facebook et al,” explained Rakkhi Samarasekera, CEO of rakkhis.com, a security startup. “If employees upload com-pany confidential documents or information, you can either block or investigate and take remedial action.”

Trendrr takes a slightly different approach by tracking location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla plus it aggregates Facebook “likes” and reputation scores via Klout. (Trendrr also has a built-in senti-ment analysis feature for tracking customer attitudes about brands and products.)

There is also a new freebie tool to track employee usage of enterprise and Internet social media on the market. NodeXL is a free, open network discovery

and exploration add-in for Excel 2007 and 2010. It extends the familiar and favorite spreadsheet to collect, analyse and graph

14%ENTERPRISES

HAVE TWO OR

MORE YEARS OF

EXPERIENCE WITH

SOCIAL MEDIA

Data loss prevention tools such as Symantec Vontu or RSA DLP can give you much more fine-grained control over what information us-ers post to Facebook et al.



A few well-thought-out initiatives at CMRI’s IT enterprise improved its operations and reduced its carbon footprint as well. BY VINITA GUPTA

COMPANY DASHBOARD

COMPANY:The Calcutta Medical

Research Institute.

ESTABLISHED:

1969

REVENUE:

250 Crore Rupees

HEADQUARTERS:

Kolkata, India

NUMBER OF

EMPLOYEES:

More than 2,500

CUSTOMERS: Eastern India and

neighbouring countries

NO OF OFFICES: 2

IN THE GREEN OF HEALTH

L I T T LE G IANT S T H E CA LCU T TA M E D I CA L RE S E A RCH I N S T I T U T EP

HO

TO

BY

NIT

ISH

SH

AR

MA



CCALCUTTA MEDICAL Research Institute is a 400-plus bed multi speciality care provider open round the clock. the company’s focus was to lower the cost involved in providing the best industry-standard services

to its customers.“Most of our terminals throughout our enterprise work 24/7,” said

CIO Vishnu Gupta. “They consume a substantial amount of power.” That these computers were often only required for limited opera-tions meant that there was scope for looking at ways to achieve sav-ings without disrupting operations, Gupta said.

The solution that was arrived at had the following phases of imple-mentation: Identification of terminals that had to be replaced with low-power-

consumption PCs. Identification of terminals with limited scope for productivity and

operations. Development of a portal to facilitate information and data manage-

ment across the organisationThe first phase started in February last year and the next two

phases ran simultaneously in August the same year. Today, the project deployment is in Beta phase, and the company has already started saving money on power – usage has reduced from 130 watts to around 12 watts per PC.

EMBRACE GREENThe project is part of an 'Embrace Green' initiative that Gupta and the organisation have set in motion.

“As our organisation relies on electronic business, we are trying to reduce carbon footprints, trim operational expenses and generate sav-ings through IT,” Gupta said. “Embrace Green is an amalgamation of three initiatives to improve operational efficiency while contributing towards the green movement in our daily operations,” he said.

Gupta and his team found practical ways of making this difference without compromising the hospital's operations. Here are some measures they took:Atom-Based PCs: A simple switch to Intel Atom-based PCs alone saved the institute reduce power consumption at those ter-minals by as much as 40 percent.

This also meant that Gupta saved money on the cap-ex that went into pur-chasing the 50 PCs he deployed as the Atom-based PCs were cheaper.Desktop virtualisation: Desktop virtu-alisation contributed to increasing the operational efficiency by reducing the downtime of hardware and sharing the resources of high-end terminals. These terminals would use the resources of a single high end PC while giving the same operational output.

“We have multiple departments which use specific software solu-tions for their day to day operations,” Gupta said. “The licensing cost for each terminal within that department increases.” Moreover with many such software solutions requiring specific hardware, replacing such terminals with thin clients became a smart option.

“Since thin clients have the capacity to replicate any machine's resources over multiple terminals, we have been able to reduce hardware-specific machines,” Gupta said. This meant a correspond-ing reduction in the related “housekeeping and maintenance” activi-ties. Finally, the power consumed by the thin clients was “negligible compared to conventional CPUs,” he said.One Stop Portal: The healthcare industry is very dynamic and a hos-pital's management needs to monitor operations very closely. This usually means a lot of paper-based reports, notifications, and com-munications are generated every day. Gupta's team used Microsoft's SharePoint to build a one-stop portal that considerably increased the efficiency of keeping track of all reports.

“Since SharePoint has become a one-stop dashboard for all on role-defined access to information, we have routed their entire information channel towards the portal,” Gupta said. “This has helped us to bring down the cost required for this function consider-ably.” He is also working towards mak-ing the online portal support the hospi-tal's Information and Data Management policy, he said.

The next step for Gupta is to imple-ment a more formal server virtualisation solution. The hospital's IT enterprise presently uses virtualisation solutions from Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Sun Microsystems, he said. —[email protected]

AS OUR ORGANISATION

RELIES ON ELECTRONIC

BUSINESS, WE ARE TRYING TO REDUCE

THE CARBON FOOTPRINT AND

GENERATE SAVINGS THROUGH IT.

T H E CA LCU T TA M E D I CA L RE S E A RCH I N S T I T U T E L I T T LE G IANT S

THREE INITIATIVES

Paperless MIS, virtualisation of desktop and low power consumption PCs. Day to day MIS and communication to go on organisational

portal online for any-time access and a delivery mechanism over smart phones. Thin clients to replicate and utilise the server resources and

deployment of very low power consuming CPUs with limited functionalities.

HOW MUCH? Cost of replacing old terminals with Atom-based PCs: INR

5,00,000 Cost of desktop virtualisation: INR 50,000 Cost of building the online portal: INR 54,000



You must not com-mit the following blunders while plan-ning to move your data centre. BY IRWIN TEODORO

IGNORANCE: Ignoring the data

COMBINATION:Combining the move

with other projects

PLANNING:Failing to plan

appropriately

INVENTORIES: Not creating an

inventory of equipment,

applications and

processes.

T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE DATA CE N T RE S

POINTS4

4CAREER-ENDINGMISTAKES

IMA

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or failure-to-vacate penalties may wipe out any projected savings from the combined projects.

Incomplete planning: Some IT profes-sionals don’t take the time or effort to prepare a comprehensive plan or complete documentation of their existing data centre environments. They either go from memory about which applications run on which servers, or make incorrect assumptions on equipment that may or may not be in use. Relying on memory practically guarantees that a key server or application won’t get moved correctly.

Smart project managers take a compre-hensive approach to planning; not only working a baseline “best case” plan to accomplish the project goals, but putting significant upfront time into risk manage-ment planning. Most failures are due to a lack of foresight — nobody thought the disaster that just hit your data centre move could happen; therefore, you didn’t plan for it.

Spend the time and meet with business owners across the organisation and your IT team. Identify some of the worst-case scenarios that could occur in your data centre move. When you think you’ve identi-

fied them all, brainstorm some more. Assess the likelihood of each scenario and the potential business impact and make con-tingency plans. Disasters may not happen, but if you prepare for them, you’ll be in a far better place if they do.

Forgetting to create a com-plete inventory: It goes without saying that any IT professionals worth their credentials will have developed strong project plans,

with plenty of slack time. However, don’t forget to develop a comprehensive inventory of every server, application, networking con-nection, storage array and everything else in your data centre before you start to move.

Work with business leaders across the enterprise to make sure you include every-thing, and be certain to have a well-docu-mented list of everything in the current data centre before planning a new one.

Being lax or unprepared in moving data can have devastating results. While com-pany expectations are high for improved

However, data centre moves can be fraught with career-ending failures. No IT profes-sional wants to be on the receiving end of memos and discussions describing lost orders, missed deadlines or customer dis-satisfaction that occurred because some mission-critical business process was dis-rupted by a data centre move that didn’t run smoothly.

In most relocation projects, there are four critical mistakes to avoid:

Ignoring the data Combining the move with other projects Failing to plan appropriately; and Not creating an inventory of equipment,

applications and processes.Taking time up front to think through

each of these will significantly improve your chances for success and the personal recog-nition that follows.

Ignoring the data: While IT professions give plenty of thought to the infrastructure involved in a data centre relocation, moving the data itself can be just as taxing. Some-times even more so. It is easy to lose sight of the data as many firms have adopted the model that business group leaders own their data, Marketing owns the prospect data base, Operations owns inventory data, and so on. Yet the reality is that the data and its underlying infrastructure must be con-sidered as part of an interconnected holistic system — not elements that can be taken apart and easily reassembled at will.

The smart IT professional will reach out to business owners before the move to

identify information that may be affected and reach agreement on such items as data access, compatibility with new systems, application migration and others. Cleansing data prior to the move may be worthwhile, but definitely not during the move.

Killing two birds with one stone: With all the planning that goes into moving a data centre, many IT professionals attempt to combine other projects, often guided by the CFO’s visions of cost savings.

This is probably the biggest mistake a firm can make.

One of our clients recently attempted to combine multiple projects into a garden-variety data centre move and wound up making the project so complex that the timeline slipped out past all available slack in the plan. The firm was subject to significant financial penalties by failing to vacate the old facil-ity on time.

Moving a data centre is a major project in and of itself, but it is not the time to take on virtualisation of the computing environ-ment, or incorporation of a new tiered-stor-age philosophy. Move your data centre first. If your operations or finance teams insist on trying to combine projects, work with your vendor or reseller on a quote for sequential projects; the fees should not be significantly more. Finally, calculate potential costs asso-ciated with the increased complexity of com-bined projects. Paying an extra month’s rent

Moving a data centre is a major undertaking for most organisations. And a successful move is a nice resume builder for any IT professional. A successful move will showcase skills in large-scale project planning, project management, technology integration and interpersonal communications. The process provides a chance for exposure across the company, as virtually every department is touched by the IT organisation (and affected by a data centre move) in some way.

DATA CE N T RE S T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE

47%THINK THAT DATA

GROWTH IS ONE

OF THE THREE TOP

CHALLENGES IN

DATA CENTRES



tion firm. He is responsible for assessment

services, integration of multi-vendor solutions,

and coordination of professional service proj-

ects. Teodoro can be reached at iteodoro@

laurustech.com.

To see more articles on this or any topic

affecting IT today, please visit www.cioupdate.

com, a premier destination site for CIOs,

CTOs, and IT executives from around the

world.

performance from a new infrastructure environment, data quality may suffer if it is quickly moved as an afterthought. At best, critical data may be temporarily unavailable. At worst, records could be permanently lost. For companies that increasingly rely on data, the ramifications range from abandoned e-commerce shopping carts and immediate loss of sales to long-term damage to custom-er relationships and company reputations.

Develop plans to relocate data with as much care as you put into hardware and building projects, and make sure you work with data owners across the enterprise. By following these recommendations, you’ll wish you could move more often.

—Irwin Teodoro is director of Systems Inte-

gration for Laurus Technologies, a leading

Midwest IT consulting and systems integra-

T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE DATA CE N T RE S

Corporate leaders commit enormous sums to technology investment — often, despite reams of ‘business cases’ — on a hope and a prayer that this money will actually buy solutions to their problems. Investments in information

technology are particularly mysterious, because it is so new and con-stantly changing. Nevertheless, it now accounts for half of all capital spending. Spent wisely, business technology investment can make

Strategically Managing Technology InvestmentsIf not managed properly they can chew through millions of dollars on the way to a write-off. BY FAISAL HOQUE

the competitive difference, but if misman-aged it can chew through a few hundred mil-lion dollars on the way to a write-off.

If technology investments are to be strate-gic and effective, it is critically important to recognise that an organisation will need not just hardware and software but new busi-ness technology management capabilities as well. Although new technologies can and have transformed the business landscape, they alone are not sufficient for success. The organisation must make complementary investments in its business processes and structures.

Technology alone is not an answer to any-thing; managing that technology together with the business is. A critical tool in making wise technology investments is the use of a portfolio. While most of you are aware of the

portfolio concept, most companies have not successfully used it to significantly improve the return on their investment in technology.

In several cases, setting priorities on projects is politically driven based on who thinks what is most critical. Although not surprising, I would argue that by applying a portfolio and program manage-ment (PPM) capability, organisations can replace political contests with fact-based decision-making.

IMA

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I NVE S TM E N T S T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE

making it possible to select among them and create an optimal investment portfolio. Through a centralised view of all business technology projects, a good portfolio will make it easy to ensure that investments are well balanced in terms of size, risk and projected payoff. Used wisely, it will actually increase business technology’s value by exposing projects that are redundant or risky, while reveal-ing how to shift funds from low-value investments to high-value, strategic ones.

PPM moves an organisation toward the convergence of business and technology management in several ways: It creates a “single view of the truth” about a firm’s operations, and it generates a com-mon vocabulary and set of metrics. It permits a comprehensive set of decisions to be made before action is taken, identifying and resolving conflicts. It allows strategic direction flowing down to meet suggested courses of action flowing up in a formal manage-ment process. PPM is, in fact, continuous: strategic planning informs portfolio managers, who reassess programmes; and proj-ects based on that information and information on the status of IT

assets, risks and financial performance likewise influ-ence subsequent strategic planning.

PPM provides information that links business needs with business technology activities enabling a converged viewpoint that is simply focused on business outcomes, rather than advancing the interests of one group versus another. PPM allows an organisation to get beyond the incomplete approach of computing the ROI of indi-vidual projects. With a portfolio viewpoint, the payback of a project can be evaluated within the context of many projects contributing to a business goal. The merits of individual projects are not seen in isolation but in con-sideration of their contribution to business capabilities

that enable a strategy. In forward thinking companies, business technology portfolios

become inseparable from other portfolios — R&D, new products, and the like — and become just another component of a business initiative.

—Faisal Hoque is an internationally known entrepreneur and author,

and the founder and CEO of BTM Corp. His previous books include

Sustained Innovation and Winning The 3-Legged Race. BTM innovates

business models and enhances financial performance by converging

business and technology with its products and intellectual property.

To see more articles on this or any topic affecting IT today, please visit

www.cioupdate.com, a premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT

executives from around the world.

The general principle that drives many companies towards a PPM approach is a simple one: An automotive company wouldn't manu-facture a car without first undergoing a comprehensive analysis and design process to determine if the car would sell; how much it would cost to manufacture; what price it should sell at; what features and functionality it should have; how long it would take to produce; and so on.

A corporation shouldn’t decide to invest in a particular technology without following the same general rule.

Various terms with various definitions have been used to describe this concept. We use portfolio and program management to convey its holistic nature. I define PPM as the enterprise-wide focus on defining, gathering, categorising, analysing and monitoring infor-mation on corporate assets and activity to achieve business objec-tives.

PPM can unite an organisation’s efforts at every level. It is a completely different way of seeing, assessing and planning the busi-ness. Portfolios can be developed far beyond the project level. They can include business models, markets, and partner companies’ knowledge. They should include people as well as physical assets and answer such questions as: Do we have the right people with the right skills in the right place to quickly adjust our business to take advantage of a new opportunity?

This use of portfolios is analogous, to a degree, to financial portfo-lio management. For example, in finance, where the concept of port-folio management originated, an investor identifies and categorises all assets and collects them in a portfolio. This allows the investor to see various aggregated views of individual investments. The investor might see, for instance, that the portfolio is weighted too heavily in one industry, has redundant exposure to one type of security, carries a certain level of risk and prom-ises a certain level of return. The investor can then set up a strategy and construct a portfolio likely to achieve an appropriate balance of risk-return.

In much the same way, technology asset portfolios reveal what a company owns and business technology project portfolios can reveal what its various arms are trying to accomplish. It can thus decide which pieces of all this activity are more likely to support the enterprise business strategy.

The bottom line is that effective PPM can help a com-pany better align business technology spending with current and future business needs. PPM creates information and insight to help executives and managers make such decisions as:

Defining business improvement options and scenarios Analysing implications/impacts of potential initiatives Setting target allocations for investment categories Evaluating and making decisions on project requests Evaluating the health of technology assets Determining appropriate sequencing of major programmes Managing risk mitigation across the enterprise; and Identifying and resolving critical project-related issues.

PPM provides a centralised and balanced view of the payoffs of various projects that lays out the benefits and risks of each one,

“In forward thinking companies, business technology portfolios become inseparable from other portfolios”

20%OF BUSINESSES

WILL HAVE NO

OWNERSHIP OF IT

ASSETS BY 2012



N O H O LDS BARR E D M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S

Michael Sentonas, Vice President and CTO Asia Pacific at McAfee Inc, has been with the company since 1999. He is a regular speaker on security issues at industry events and executive roundtables across the Asia Pacific region, and is a passionate advocate of the business value of IT security management. In an interaction with R Giridhar at the recent McAfee Focus 10 event, Sentonas discusses the evolving security landscape and the new approaches to security.

BusinessTHE NEW

Enabler

SECURITY



M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S N O H O LDS BARR E D

What technology trends will have the greatest impact on

security? Consumerisation of IT and expand-ing definition of what is an end-point will have a huge influence on secu-rity. Today, there are many kinds of devices that can be connected to the enterprise network—from PCs and laptops to mobile phones and tablet PCs as well as fixed-function devices such as point-of-sale (POS) termi-nals, ATM machines, printers, stor-age and other devices. All of these IP-enabled devices have the potential for vulnerability and exploitation.

A growing problem for IT admin-istrators is the increasing trend of users bringing in their own mobile hardware and devices to the work-place, and then detaching from the corporate LAN taking these devices home. How do you secure such devices and enforce policies in a con-sistent fashion?

Another technology trend that has been happening for nearly a decade is virtualisation. Keeping virtual serv-ers as well as virtual desktops pro-tected, while ensuring performance optimisation is another big chal-lenge. Going forward, we will need to think about security for the cloud, in the cloud and from the cloud.

How will these influence the way we think about security?

The traditional security philosophy was “defence in depth”. Conse-quently, IT departments employed a wide range of tools and technologies from various vendors in an effort to ensure adequate security. While this approach has some benefits, the disadvantages far outweigh them, for example, multiple management consoles that don’t inter-operate, multiple update servers, multiple agents on an endpoint, and overlap-ping functionalities. The security landscape continually changes and today, IT teams need to deal with a larger variety and volume of threats, and a dizzying array of computing platforms. The result is a prolifera-

tion security solutions and options. Take for instance a typical cor-

porate organisation. It would have deployed solutions including host intrusion protection systems (HIPS), firewalls, desktop and server anti-virus, and encryption to ensure security. Often, these will be ‘best-of-breed’ options. The big problem for the IT department is that these security solutions don’t inter-operate or integrate with each other. So, it becomes very hard to manage them, keep them updated and patched.

What is the overhead associ-ated with multiple solutions

versus providing the same func-tionality from one solution?Organisations need to start looking at newer approaches to security: an example is next-generation whitelist-ing, an approach that gives you con-trol over application behaviour, not blacklisting, to reduce the manage-ment overhead. Basically, you need to re-think the way you do end-point security, network security, content security, security management with the goal to move to a more optimised security architecture.

What is your company’s vision for next generation

security?The traditional model of putting in new security solutions for each new

threat vector and scenario is simply not viable. Today, businesses require an integrated intelligent security solution that provides a global view of threats, vulnerabilities, and the counter measures to address them. We think that McAfee is best positioned to provide a full suite of correlated and comprehensive intel-ligence that can significantly reduce risk, enhance security preparedness, help meet compliance regulations, and enhance operational efficiencies. We would like security to support business innovation, to allow the use of new technology and services and do it securely and safely rather than security being a business inhibitor.

What are the elements of your next generation security

strategy?We are proposing a multi-component and multi-tiered approach to security that can be rapidly deployed, and is easy to manage. Some components of our initiative include: McAfee Security Connected is

an open framework for integrating potentially disparate security tech-nologies. The framework enables technologies to work together through collective intelligence, it also enhances each solution’s individual security capabilities, efficiencies, and effectiveness. Delivering integrated security solu-

tions for PCs, smart phones, storage devices, embedded systems, network perimeter, data center, web gateways, mail security, content, through a choice of on-premise, SaaS and hybrid delivery models. Developing predictive security solu-

tions that can proactively find and protect against vulnerabilities, target and predict threats based on policies and events Today’s networks face continuous

threats and unauthorised access to resources. Combining real-time threat awareness, award-winning firewall and intrusion prevention technologies with network access control, and an optimised manage-

“We would like security to support business innovation, to allow the use of new technology and services.”

DOSSIER

COMPANY:McAfee Inc

SERVICES:

Enterprise and

personal Security

products



N O H O LDS BARR E D M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S

ment platform, our goal is to deliver the world’s most comprehensive network defense. Performing ongoing research and analysis

to predict threats, perform ‘reputational’ scoring, and rapidly deliver the results to many kinds of connected devices through the cloud.

What specific solutions have you developed that tie into this strategy?

While antivirus technologies are still an important part of our product portfolio, we also have network security, data protec-tion, security-as-a-service (SaaS), and risk and compliance business units. We work on a number of areas of security, including hypervisor-based protection, application white-listing, cloud-based security, as well as management and inter-operation of

security solutions. We have been providing SaaS solutions for over ten years with offer-ings that span endpoint protection, vulner-ability assessment services, e-mail and Web security as well as cloud-based global threat intelligence technologies. We will continue to advance and improve these services.

Our latest releases are Endpoint Security 9 and Security Management 5. The first provides protection for desktops, serv-ers, virtual machines, mobile devices and embedded systems.

The Management Optimised for Virtu-alised Environments Platform (MOVE) technology improves virtual machine den-sity and performance by offloading security functions like AV scanning. It also facilitates seamless security and management control

across virtual and physical environments. Our customers say that McAfee Endpoint Security optimises security performance and reduces the total cost of ownership.

The other new solution is McAfee Secu-rity Management 5. This is a centralised management platform that delivers proac-tive risk management, integration with business operations, and coordinated security defences. It can give an IT man-ager a full risk profile across multiple security layers, vendors, products and solutions—enabling a good understand-ing of the threat landscape and business risk. When used in conjunction with the Enterprise Mobility Management 9.0 (EMM) platform, it enables enterprises to extend the data centre to smart phones with the same control, visibility and secu-rity they get with laptops.

What is your advice to IT manag-ers who need to manage enterprise

security?Security professionals have a growing challenge to prevent unauthorised intru-sions, they have an obligation to protect the company from data loss and an even bigger challenge just trying keep up with a deluge of threats on the Internet. Trying to do this when many businesses are keeping IT spend relatively flat in the current economic climate is one challenge. Another is helping the business understand the challenges, calculating things like annualised loss expectancy (or risk to business) in monetary terms and explaining it to senior manage-ment can be very tough. At the same time they also have to plan, implement and run

the security systems to protect the enter-prise from these risks.

I would suggest that IT managers begin by adopting a platform or framework for security that conforms to their industry-spe-cific needs, and, take a proactive approach to towards both security optimisation and deployment. This means that you should: Create and implement a security policy for

your organisation. Make sure that the policy is frequently reviewed and that it takes into account the evolving threat landscape. Make sure that the people responsible for

security are closely aligned with business requirements — otherwise the security policy will not succeed. Security should not inhibit business or impose unwarranted costs and inflexibility. Get good understanding of all your corpo-

rate assets and their vulnerabilities. Learn about the counter measures. Anything that can connect to or transact on your network should be understood, only then can you figure out how it can be compromised and of course protected. Audit your network and connected devices regularly and assign a business value to the device. Based on the value you place on a device or service and understand what vulnerabilities and expo-sures exist, you can determine the amount of protection technology to deploy. Build protection strategies for the entire

organisation (including firewalls, intrusion protection systems, and anti-malware pro-grams). Based on your appetite for risk you can choose the solution, vendor and service. Take steps to streamline and unify disparate security strategies. Implement a phased measurement and

compliance process to ensure that your security policy is functioning, the protec-tions are adequate, and your organisation meets compliance needs. You should have consistent information that gives you a com-plete view of the risk landscape. Leverage a unified platform to deploy, manage and report on security. Keep yourself updated on the evolving

security landscape and threats, and adapt your security policy and protection mea-sures. Educate users about security. People are often the weakest link in the security environment.

—[email protected]

“IT heads should begin by adopting a platform for security that conforms to their industry-specific needs.”

HIDE TIME | CIO PROFILE

All the Good ThingsJS PURI CIO, Fortis Healthcare

MUSIC: Puri's home theatre includes a high end studio five way Onkyo front end speakers, with a 12” woofer. The system uses Mordaunt Short active subwoofer for bass and dipolars from the same brand for the side surround speakers. The rear speakers are bipolar Wharf Dale.

CAMERAS: Puri has a host of cameras that fuel his passion for photography. A

host of Nikons, Canons and a Hasselblack medium format camera complete the collection.

THE RIDE: Puri’s passion for all things good is reflected in his car too. Like his audio equipment he has a unique car too – the Lexus LX 470. The massive luxury SUV runs on a 4.5 litre petrol engine, delivering more than 250 horses.

PH

OT

OS

BY

SU

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OJI

T P

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joined Sharda Motors not only for a business venture, but to satisfy his other big passion – music. A very discerning audiophile, Puri loves to relax at home and watch DVDs of rock concerts from around the world on his very elaborate home theatre.

IF WE WERE to rank CIOs on the basis of the professional accomplishments and on the scale of their passion towards life, JS Puri would be at the top of the pyramid. He loves everything – from his car to the latest enterprise sys-tem implementation he is undertaking for Fortis Healthcare, one of the fast-est growing hospital chains in India and South East Asia.

JS Puri started his career with DCM data systems in the late 70s and then moved on to HCL after a few years. Here he was involved in a division called International Integration, which involved in importing and selling copiers, Dictaphones etc. from Toshiba in the 80s.

After this, he moved to Ranbaxy for the first time and then moved to an American company called Far East Technologies, based out of Boston. It was a system implementation company with operations in the United States, Middle East and APAC. He was heading their operations for APAC. This was the time, comparatively early in his career, that he was responsible for 16 multi-site ERP implementations, mostly in the automotive industry.

He came back to India for a short stint at Bhushan Steels, after which he

49 07 NOVEMBER 2010 CTO FORUMTHE CHIEF


HIDE TIME | CIO PROFILE

With Sharda Motors, he was able to bring to a life an old desire of bringing Naka-michi, Marantz and Boston Acoustics to India.

He then joined Ranbaxy as the Director of Corporate Affairs and was heading SRL Ranbaxy, one of the largest chains of pathological labs, as its CEO.

According to him technology is never a challenge for him but people are. “Wherever I have been, technology, healthcare or audio, people play a very criti-cal role. I have taken it as a challenge to be able to satisfy my customers and the people working with me as soon as possible. I think I have done pretty well to achieve that,” he says.

But work is not the only place where is heart is, as he says, “photography is my second passion”. He has been an ardent photographer who has even done pro-fessional assignments. He has a great collection of cameras too, that range from Nikon, Canon and as he says, “For some strange reasons, a Hasselblad”. He has worked with Hardev Singh, a specialist large format photographer with an exper-tise in architectural photography.

His first passion is his music. And, it is nowhere close to be called a passing hobby. Music runs in this man’s veins. An audiophile to the core, he has played in a band called Genuine Spares in the Shimla Beat Contest. He has hundreds of DVDs and Blue Ray discs of all the bands that you can think of.

He likes all kinds of music, starting from Grand Funk Rail Road, Traffic, Eric Claption, Santana to Garry Moore. He loves to have music jams where he and his friends come together to listen to the music that they like. JS Puri lives in Faridabad with his wife Mini and his dog, Buddy. —By Geetaj Channana

The Collections – Uncut Stones: If Puri’s car

delivers raw power, the raw uncut stones in his home

make it look something else altogether. He and his

wife have a beautiful collection of uncut precious

stones that include rubies, emeralds, sapphires, a 90

kg mother cross quartz clear crystal (with several

terminators) and a 7 kg yellow citiren amongst many

others. If this is not surprising enough, the collection

also includes a molask fossil from the bottom of the

sea, which is millions of years old.

The Collections - DVD and Blue ray: A music

enthusiast like him must have a whole lot of music –

right. He has a collection of at least 500 DVDs. A big

part of this collection is DVDs of live rock concerts.

The story behind how he made such a huge

collection is also very interesting. “There was a time

when I used to pass by Amsterdam airport only

because they had the best collection of music that

you could get anywhere else.” Says Puri. He likes all

kinds of movies with the favourite being Ice Age,

Matrix and The Devil Wears Prada.

Snap Shot

50 07 NOVEMBER 2010 CTO FORUM THE CHIEF


HIDDENTANGENTTHE AUTHOR IS Executive Editor, CTO Forum GEETAJ CHANNANA

[email protected]



Technology Inspired by AnimalsThere is more than one way in which nature affects technology.

"The basi-lisk lizard is able to run on water by bicycling it legs on the surface of water"

HAVE you seen a cat jump off a high wall and land safely on its feet? Try doing that yourself and you would know how difficult it is. One of the many things that enables the cat to pull-off this stunt is hidden in its feet and the way it uses them. The cat first lands on its toes and then uses the heel to cushion its fall.

Have you heard of the Jesus Christ Lizard? This too has marvelous feet. This particular lizard can actually run on water without getting drowned. Yes, a lot of insects can do the same, but their body mass is not enough to break the density of water – but the basilisk lizard is pretty big. It is able to run on water by bicycling it legs on top of the water at such an angle that its body rises out of the water on its own.

Without making it sound like useless rants, I would give you one more example. This time it is about the Owl. You can hear the owl hoot but have you ever tried listening to it fly. Probably not. Since, it feeds

the Thinkpad”, explained it to us last week. The owl’s feather is structured in a way that it cuts air without mak-ing a lot of noise. The tips are curved and cut in a way, by evolution, that they do not make a sound while mov-ing through air. The fans that cool the Thinkpads are designed by taking inspiration from the owl’s feathers. This includes the shape and the speed at which they rotate.

The third example that I took above, of the Jesus Christ lizard, has not been converted into a com-mercial technology yet. There are experiments underway by Metin Sitti of Carnegie Mellon University. He is trying to imitate the basilisk lizard’s movements in robots that can be used to run on water and help in research and rescue operations.

The next time you are watching National Geographic and see an ani-mal do something extraordinary, look around your home – you may already have something that has been inspired by the way nature works.

mostly in the night on prey that have extremely sensitive senses – it has to fly extremely swiftly, without making a sound.

But, why am I talking about ani-mals in a technology publication? This is because two of the above mentioned three feats have already converted into technologies that we use on a daily basis. The third one, is still being experimented upon. Leno-vo’s Thinkpad team has learnt from the cat and the owl to make their notebooks more reliable and silent.

Lenovo uses something called the cat’s paw design in their rubber pads that you see in your laptop comput-ers. The seemingly simple part has been inspired by the cat’s feet and helps in reducing shocks the laptop computer. The dual impact system cushions the laptop from crashing when you throw it on the table in rage after a fight with your boss.

But how can the owl be used to make your job easier? Arimasa Nai-toh, affectionately called “Father of

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