Cover March.

qxp 2/28/2011 2:24 PM Page 1

 editorial
Brian Pereira

The Cloud is for real and it’s happening

Not long ago I met a CIO at a cloud computing forum and he told me While Indian
that the cloud was 90 percent “talk” and just 10 percent implementation.
So I wondered if ‘cloud’ was just another industry buzzword (remember
enterprises
Y2K?). My editorial team and I attended several cloud computing forums, aren’t exactly
scrutinized numerous cloud computing reports, and consulted many CIOs, migrating its IT
analysts and vendors. And after months of research, we have come to this infrastructure
unanimous conclusion: while Indian enterprises aren’t exactly migrating its IT to the cloud in
infrastructure to the cloud in droves, the cloud, particularly private clouds, are droves, the cloud,
indeed happening. And the fastest cloud adoption rates are likely to happen in
the small and medium sized businesses (SMBs).
particularly
Let me back this statement with some hard facts: private clouds, are
l TCS, India’s premier software services company, expects USD 1 billion in indeed happening
revenues from cloud-based services for SMBs over the next five years
l Zinnov projects the cloud computing market in India to be worth USD 1

billion by 2015; it currently stands at USD 70 million

l According to Gartner, India-centric IT services companies will represent

20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud

service offerings)
l Gartner also says that by 2012 around 20 percent of all businesses will not

own any IT assets — it will all be hosted on the cloud

l There are close to 39 million SMBs in India and 60 percent of these do

not have any ICT infrastructure; over 95 percent of Indian companies

are SMBs
l Tata Communications is aiming for 25 percent of the USD 1 billion cloud

pie in India; it is pitching its cloud services at the SMB sector

l Most cloud adoption implementations in the country are SaaS-based but

IaaS is the fastest growing cloud segment

To validate all this, our team of talented journalists approached more
than 20 organizations in the country across sectors like IT/ITES, telecom,
healthcare, BFSI, education, retail and government.
And after this exercise what really touched us was not the numbers or
the projections. We are really impressed at the impact that cloud technology
is making on businesses; and how companies are using this technology in
innovative ways.
I am proud to declare that this issue presents a comprehensive insight into
the adoption of cloud computing in India. The cloud is indeed for real, and it’s
happening.
And I hope that skeptical gentleman is reading this. n

Brian Pereira is Editor of InformationWeek India.

brian.pereira@ubm.com

4 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
 contents
THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY

16 cover story 28 How partner ecosystems are shaping the

cloud
Private clouds witness surge in adoption Telcos, ISVs, SIs, OEMs, cloud aggregators and
platform providers are forging strategic partnerships
Evidence on the ground indicates that a host of Indian
and creating cloud ecosystems
enterprises are gradually taking a stepping stone into
the cloud by building their own private clouds

33 Cloud shines bright in the Indian skies

23 Cloud views
From SaaS, PaaS and IaaS – Indian CIOs are gradually
With cloud computing in India set to touch USD 1
billion by 2015, cloud vendors are tapping every
available opportunity
stepping up their focus on the cloud. Here is a
snapshot of what you can expect in 2011

38 The cloud as a springboard

24 Tales from the cloud

Insights, lessons and unique experiences from Indian
A rising number of Indian companies are using the
immense power of the cloud to transform their
business models
CIOs who have built their own private clouds

46 Cloud Computing case studies

l Private cloud helps L&T Infotech slash infrastructure costs l Pennar simplifies processes with MS CRM online cloud service
l Indian greetings card company uses cloud to manage dynamic traffic

Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

6 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
 Volume 2 Issue 10 March 2011

interview
Stefan Van Overtveldt
56
Chief Engineer Officer, Mastek

News 10 case study

Bringing people together on one platform
57
Fast paced growth, a large and scattered user base, and
hordes of skeptical users pose many challenges while
transitioning to a new messaging and collaboration
platform. Here’s how Electrotherm got round these
challenges

feature 61
Six ways to fail in the cloud
Our latest survey shows double-digit increases in cloud
adoption. But ignore integration, management and
monitoring at your peril

EDITORIAL.......................................................................... 4

INDEX................................................................................... 8
Case Study 57
NEWS................................................................................... 9

news analysis............................................................... 12

opinion............................................................................50

book review..................................................................60

cio profile.....................................................................64

technology & risks..................................................65

Global CIO.....................................................................66

analyst angle.............................................................68

practical analysis...................................................69

down to business....................................................... 70
Global CIO 66

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imprint
print online newsletters events research

VOLUME 2 NO. 10 n March 2011

Managing Director : Sanjeev Khaira Head Office Editorial index

Printer & Publisher : Sajid Yusuf Desai UBM India Pvt Ltd, 1st floor, 119, Sagar Tech Plaza A,
Director : Kailash Shirodkar Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Person & Organization
Editor : Brian Pereira
Senior Associate Editor : Srikanth RP Mumbai 400072, India.
Abhay Chitnis, L&T Infotech........................46
Principal Correspondent : Vinita Gupta Tel: 022 6769 2400; Fax: 022 6769 2426
Senior Correspondent : Ayushman Baruah (Bengaluru) Aditya Rao, Pennar Industries.................... 47
Senior Correspondent : Pratibha Verma (New Delhi) associate office- pune Anand Naik, Symantec................................. 35
Senior Copy Editor : Bhaswati Das
Jagdish Khaladkar, Sahayog Apartment 508 Narayan Peth, Arun Gupta, Shoppers Stop......................... 24
Design Patrya Maruti Chowk, Pune 411 030 Tel: 91 (020) 2445 1574
Art Director : Deepjyoti Bhowmik Arun Mehru, True Value Homes................. 26
Designers : Yogesh Naik , Shailesh Vaidya, (M) 98230 38315 e-mail: jagdishk@vsnl.com Charan Padmaraju, redBus..........................44
Jinal Cheda David Wirt, Tata Communications ..............27
Marketing International Associate Offices
Sr. Executive–Marketing : Arshi Khan, Sejal Acharya USA Daya Prakash, LG Electronics India...........64
Advertising Co-ordinator : Jagruti Kudalkar Huson International Media Dr Deven Shah,
Operations David Steifman, david@husonusa.com S P Institue of Technology........................... 22
Head—Finance : Yogesh Mudras Tel: 212 268 3344 ext. 102; Fax: 212 268 3355 Dr Neena Pahuja,
Head—Operations & : Satyendra Mehra
April Ramirez, april@husonusa.com Max Healthcare Institute.............................. 22
Administration
Sales
Tel: 408 879 6666, (M): 408 429 4516, Fax: 408 879 6669 Ganesan Arumugam, Vmware India.......... 33
Bengaluru George Paul, HCL Infosystems.....................32
Group Commercial Director : Anees Ahmed EMEA
Harish Ganesan, 8KMiles............................. 43
anees.ahmed@ubm.com Huson International Media
(M) +91 98450 32170 Kawaljit Singh Bedi,
Gerry Rhoades Brown, gerryrb@husonmedia.com
Deputy Manager—Sales : Satish Kutty NDTV Convergence....................................... 45
satish.krishnankutty@ubm.com Tel: +44 19325 64999, Fax: + 44 19325 64998
Kunwar Kishore, Bharti Airtel......................27
(M) +91 98452 07810
Delhi Japan Laxman Badiga, Wipro Technologies........ 20
Group Commercial Director : Pankaj Jain Pacific Business (PBI) M D Mallya, Bank Of Baroda......................... 13
pankaj.jain@ubm.com Hiroshi Okawa, okawa-pbi@gol.com
(M) +91 98101 72077 Manish Dhingra, Mediology.........................40
Manager : Sanjay Khandelwal Tel: +81 3366 16138; Fax: +81 3366 16139 Mayank Sahai, Tata Teleservices................. 12
sanjay.khandelwal@ubm.com N Nataraj, Hexaware Technologies............. 21
(M) +91 98117 64515 South Korea
Mumbai Young Media Nikhil Soman, Dialify Technologies............ 42
Group Commercial Director : Salil Warior Young Baek, ymedia@chol.com Prasanna Gogwekar, QID Technologies.... 43
salil.warior@ubm.com
(M) +91 98214 58018 Tel: +82 2227 34819; Fax : +82 2227 34866 R Sankaranarayanan.....................................44
Dy. Manager : Sagar Nanal Rajeev Batra, MTS...........................................27
sagar.nanal@ubm.com Printed and Published by Sajid Yusuf Desai on behalf of
(M) +91 98202 81302 Rajesh Awasthi, NetApp................................32
UBM India Pvt Ltd, 6th floor, 615-617, Sagar Tech Plaza A,
Production Ravinder Jain, Aircel......................................27
Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Mumbai
Deputy Manager : Prakash (Sanjay) Adsul 400072, India. Editor: Brian Pereira, Printed at Indigo Press Rohit Madhur, SAP India ...............................37
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Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027. Satish Joshi, Patni.......................................... 21
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Manager Database : Manoj Ambardekar Satyadev Adurti, Acme Telepower.............. 41
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Sharad Kajaria, IntraSoft Technologies....48
deepa.chaurasia@ubm.com
Sharad Sadadekar,
ADVERTISERS’ INDEX HDFC Standard Life Insurance.................... 28
Company name Page No. Website Sales Contact Stefan Van Overtveldt, Mastek................... 56
Oracle 2 www.oracle.com oracleindia_in@oracle.com Sukumar R, Ramco Systems........................ 36
Oracle 3 www.oracle.com oracleindia_in@oracle.com V Ramaswamy. iON......................................... 17
Kyocera 5 www.kyoceramita.co.in dilip.kanth@kyoceramita.co.in
Vijay Sethi, Hero Honda................................27
Elitecore 11 www.cyberoam.com sales@cyberoam.com
Vikas Gupta, Tech Mahindra......................... 21
IBM 13 www.ibm.com
Fujitsu 21 www.fujitsu-india.com info@fujitsu-india.com Vikram Rai, Viva Infomedia......................... 30
ZOHO Development 27 www.ManageEngine.com/it360 sales@manageengine.com Vishad Rahangdale, Electrotherm............. 57
APC 59 www.apc.com/promo indiainfo@apcc.com Vishnu Bhat, Infosys Technologies.............27
Airtel 71 www.Airtel.com Vivek Desai, Sonata Software ..................... 10
Microsoft 72 www.microsoft.com/india/visualstudio

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8 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in

news
Software
Sonata Software bags Euro 5
million IMS deal from ATU
Bangalore-based mid-tier IT services
firm, Sonata Software has bagged
a Euro 5 million infrastructure
management services (IMS) deal from
ATU, Germany’s largest automobile
service company. As per the terms of
the five-year contract, Sonata will be
hosting all the applications for them
on their data centers in Hannover in
Germany.
IMS is a significant revenue stream
for Sonata. “Of our USD 300 million
worth revenues, IMS contributes about
USD 60-70 million which is roughly 20
percent of our total revenues,” said B
Ramaswamy, President and Managing
Director of Sonata Software. “Over the
years, big bang outsourcing has been
replaced by a more granular model
wherein you provide focused services
such as storage, support, etc,” he added.
The deal with ATU, bagged
about six months back, has further
enhanced Sonata’s presence in
Germany. “Sonata offers these
services with a combined on-shore
and off-shore delivery model,” said
Vivek Desai, VP, Sonata Software.
Sonata derives close to 60 percent
of its offshore services revenues from
Europe and the majority of this is
from continental Europe. With close
to 500 employees and three data
centers in Hannover, Sonata’s service
offerings in the region include IT
infrastructure management services
encompassing data center services,
application hosting, server monitoring
and management, and 24x7 centralized
helpdesks.
Sonata claims to have the
widest range of IMS offering in
the continental Europe region. In
2006, Sonata acquired a majority
stake in TUI InfoTec to form a joint
venture with TUI AG, Europe’s largest
integrated travel company. The
acquisition has helped Sonata further
strengthen its foothold in the IT
infrastructure management space.
For the quarter ended December
30, 2010, Sonata’s consolidated
revenue stood at about USD 77
million with its international business
(IT services plus TUI InfoTec)
contributing USD 43 million. Roughly
80 percent of Sonata’s workforce is
concentrated in its delivery centers
in Bangalore and Hyderabad in India,
while the remaining 20 percent works
out of Hannover.
Ayushman Baruah
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k
Cloud Computing
BSNL-Datacraft
alliance targets
SMBs for cloud
Last year, BSNL and Datacraft
announced an alliance to
jointly provide managed
hosted and cloud services
under the brand ‘onecloud’.
After initially testing out the
market, the alliance believes
that SMBs represent a huge
market, in addition to the
enterprises, where both
Datacraft and BSNL have a
major presence.
This is corroborated by
independent research from
analyst firms. For example, a
recent report by AMI-Partners,
predicts that SMB spending in
India on SaaS, is anticipated to
rise by a significant 43 percent
in 2011.
The alliance hopes to
capitalize on this opportunity
by offering them a complete
set of services such as
messaging, ERP, HR or backup
services on the cloud.
“The cloud is a cost-
effective and quick solution
for the SMBs,” says Karthik
Ramarao, Principal Consultant,
Datacraft Asia. Ramarao
believes that SMBs can gain
from the advantage of BSNL’s
reach and connectivity.
Datacraft is in the process
of building six data centers
across the country for BSNL,
and by around April 2011 all the
datacenters will be effective.
The data centers are
located in Jaipur, Mumbai,
Ahmedabad, Ludhiana,
Ghaziabad and Faridabad
and are inter-connected.
While SMBs are a major focus,
demand is expected to be
strong among enterprise
customers too.
Vinita Gupta
9
news

Telecom
FORM IV

MNP pushes telcos Statement about ownership and other particulars about
newspaper informationweek to be published in the first issue
towards analytics every year after the last day of February

Industry experts opine that it costs 5-10 times more to 1. PLACE OF PUBLICATION MUMBAI
recruit a new customer than to retain the existing one. 2. PERIODICITY OF ITS PUBLICATION monthly
With MNP, this possibility has increased exponentially 3. PRINTERS NAME sajid yusuf desai
– as subscribers have the opportunity to migrate to a NATIONALITY INDIAN
1[(a) WHETHER A CITIZEN OF INDIA? YES
new network while retaining their existing number.
(b) IF A FOREIGNER, THE COUNTRY
“With Mobile Number Portability (MNP), the OF ORIGIN NOT APPLICABLE
command is in the hand of customers and not telecom ADDRESS Sagar Tech Plaza, A 615-617,
service providers,” opines Amitava Ghosh, Senior VP 6th floor, Andheri Kurla Road,
and Head, Analytics and BI at Reliance Communication. Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E),
Mumbai 400 072, India
At the recently held SAS Forum held in Mumbai in
February 2011, a number of telecom service providers 4. Publisher’s Name sajid yusuf desai
shared this common belief on the increasing importance NATIONALITY INDIAN
of analytics in understanding customer preferences 1[(a) WHETHER A CITIZEN OF INDIA? YES
accurately, and in maximizing customer value. (b) IF A FOREIGNER, THE COUNTRY
OF ORIGIN] NOT APPLICABLE
ADDRESS Sagar Tech Plaza, A 615-617,
6th floor, Andheri Kurla Road,
Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E),
Mumbai 400 072, India

5. EDITOR’S NAME brian pereira

NATIONALITY INDIAN
1[(a) WHETHER CITIZEN OF INDIA YES
(b) IF A FOREIGNER, THE COUNTRY
OF ORIGIN] NOT APPLICABLE
ADDRESS Sagar Tech Plaza, A 615-617,
6th floor, Andheri Kurla Road,
Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E),
Mumbai 400 072, India

6. Names and Addresses of ubm india pvt ltd.,

“Analytics play an important role in the entire life-
cycle management of the customers. It’s crucial to have
a 360 degree view of the customer’s data and based
on this information, further segmentation should be
done,” said Mayank Sahai, Additional VP-CLM at Tata
Teleservices Limited (TTL).
With the help of analytics, the list of high churn
risk customers can also be predicted. For example,
telecom service providers can offer a change of plan, if
a customer is not happy with a particular plan.
individuals who own the Sagar Tech Plaza, A 615-617,
newspaper and partners or 6th floor, Andheri Kurla Road,
shareholders holding more Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E),
than one per cent of the Mumbai 400 072, India
total capital Stormcliff limited
Julia House,
3, Themistocles Dervis Street,
1o66, Nicosia
Cyprus
I sajid yusuf desai, HEREBY DECLARE THAT THE PARTICULARS GIVEN
ABOVE ARE TRUE AND TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF.
SIGNATURE OF PUBLISHER

Vinita Gupta DATED: 15th February 2011

10 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
Data Center

HP to help Bank of Baroda undergo transformation

Bank of Baroda has signed an
enterprise IT agreement with HP to
support its banking transformation.
This agreement will help the bank
support its rapid expansion plans,
streamline its operations and utilize
emerging technologies to deliver
innovative new services.
The bank selected HP for
this transformation, including
the assessment of the bank’s
applications and upgradation of
IT infrastructure. HP will provide
application modernization services
and business intelligence to
support new business services.
HP consulting services will map
out the datacenter transformation,
utilizing HP Converged
Infrastructure. This includes
server, storage and networking,
supported by HP Mission Critical
Support. HP will also roll out a new
mobile banking solution platform
allowing customers to access
banking services through mobile
devices.
“At Bank of Baroda, we are
embarking on a new phase of
banking transformation that
will allow us extend our growth
into new and existing markets.
Technology is an integral part of
this transformation providing us
the agility to address changing
market dynamics. HP has been a
strategic partner with us through
our journey for the last five years,”
said M. D. Mallya, Chairman and
Managing Director, Bank of Baroda,
India.
“With changing consumer
expectations, banks are looking
for new ways to innovate, create
new services and react quickly
to market opportunities. The
agreement with Bank of Baroda
will create a more flexible
technology environment and
strengthen its competitiveness,”
said Leo Apotheker, CEO, HP.
InformationWeek News Network

Elitecore Wins
NASSCOM Innovation Award 2011
for Cyberoam’s Layer 8 Technology
In yet another crowning achievement, Elitecore, provider of Cyberoam UTM
appliances has won the ‘NASSCOM Innovation Award 2011’ in “New
Technology Advancement” category for Cyberoam's Layer 8 technology.
Cyberoam was also recently named the No.1 UTM Appliance Vendor in India as
per the IDC Q3, 2010 Appliance Tracker report.

For organizations, Cyberoam's Layer 8 technology gives them the unique

advantage of security + productivity by offering granular access based on each
user's business requirements while enforcing identity-based controls on their
network activities.

Cyberoam UTM ties security to end user identity through Layer 8

technology, allowing IT managers complete visibility and controls over
online activities in the network. It facilitates identification of behavior
patterns to denote misuse, unauthorized intrusions, or malicious
attacks from inside or outside the enterprise by specific users or groups.

www.cyberoam.com | sales@cyberoam.com Elitecore Product

march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 11
news analysis
TCS does a Nano; launches
cloud-based iON for SMBs
India’s largest service provider expects the business from iON to become a
USD 1 billion unit in revenues in the next five years
By Srikanth RP
What does a software behemoth do
when it has probably milked every
service line and has clients spanning
every possible sector? TCS answered this
question aptly by donning new robes and
stepping into unchartered territory. On
February 15, 2011; TCS launched iON – a
fully integrated IT solution for SMBs.
The scale of the opportunity can
be seen from the fact that TCS expects
revenues from this business to grow to
USD 1 billion. Another indication that this
was not just a routine announcement was
evident because the press launch of iON
was attended by the some of the biggest
names in the Tata group — Ratan Tata, the
chairman of the Tata Group and FC Kohli,
considered to be the father of the Indian
software industry.
With the Indian market consisting of
close to 39 million SMBs – which many
market observers and analysts believe
is underserved, TCS has the opportunity
to garner a big chunk of this market with
its first mover advantage. TCS believes
that the ‘small’ segment is big, as over 95
percent of Indian firms are SMBs.
“Over 60 percent of SMBs in India
do not have any ICT infrastructure.
The sky is the limit in terms of scale of
opportunities,” points out V Ramaswamy,
Global Head, iON.
The firm has also been smart enough
to realize that the solutions are extremely
different when it comes to SMBs.
Understanding that SMBs have to often
grapple with multiple service providers;
TCS has offered a bundled solution that
12 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
TCS
“Over 60 percent of SMBs in India do
not have any ICT infrastructure. The
sky is the limit in terms of scale of
opportunities”
V Ramaswamy, Global Head, iON
includes hardware, networks, software
and business applications on the cloud.
This is backed by technical and consulting
services.
“iON is a 3rd generation model.
Generation 1 is the traditional license-
based model. Generation 2 is delivering
software-as-a-service model (SaaS). In
Generation 3, we integrate hardware,
network, software and services as well.
No other player in the market offers such
an end-to-end solution stack as we do,”
claims Ramaswamy. TCS calls this the ‘IT-
as-a-service’ model.
TCS is looking to create a new
market by re-engineering a solution
instead of configuring existing enterprise
solutions to suit the needs of SMBs. “The
sales force for this unit is different, the
delivery organization is different – this is
a separate business unit. This is the only
way that we can create a new business
model,” confesses Ramaswamy.
For nearly two years, TCS
painstakingly went to the interiors of
rural India to study the needs of SMBs.
Many of the solutions have been co-
created by working closely with SMBs.
TCS has already signed up more than 130
customers, and expects this to go up to
1,000 in a year’s time.
The firm has also carefully chosen
the verticals that it wants to first
operate in. The chosen verticals are
manufacturing, retail, wellness, education
and professional services. These verticals
have been chosen because the rate of
growth from an IT spend perspective in
these verticals is comparitively faster.
While the revenues as a percentage of
total revenues are naturally negligible, the
potential is huge.
As firms grow, TCS wants to partner
in their growth. For example, Oxford
Bookstore, which is a part of the Apeejay
Surrendra Group, used the TCS platform
to create a loyalty points program that
helped in broadening the customer base
of Oxford Bookstore.
TCS has like other Indian IT peers
been trying to de-link its revenues from
the head count. In this context, iON is a
path breaking initiative, as it gives TCS an
opportunity equal to perhaps what the
Nano offered for Tata Motors. n
Srikanth RP (srikanth.rp@ubm.com)
www.informationweek.in
cover story Cloud computing

A comprehensive insight into how the cloud is

transforming the entire ecosystem of end users, partners,
vendors and service providers

14 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
Private clouds witness
surge in adoption
Evidence on the ground
indicates that a host of Indian
enterprises are gradually
taking a stepping stone into
the cloud by building their
own private clouds
Tales from the cloud
Insights, lessons and unique
experiences from Indian CIOs
who have built their own
private clouds
Cloud shines bright in the
Indian skies
With cloud computing in
India set to touch USD
1 billion by 2015, cloud
vendors are tapping every
available opportunity
Cloud Computing case studies
l Private cloud helps L&T Infotech slash infrastructure costs
l Pennar simplifies processes with MS CRM online cloud service
l Indian greetings card company uses cloud to manage dynamic traffic
Cloud views
From SaaS, PaaS and
IaaS – Indian CIOs are gradually
stepping up their focus on the
cloud. Here is a snapshot of what
you can expect in 2011
16 23
How partner ecosystems
are shaping the cloud
Telcos, ISVs, SIs, OEMs, cloud
aggregators and platform
providers are forging strategic
partnerships and creating cloud
ecosystems
24 28
The cloud as a springboard
A rising number of Indian
companies are using the
immense power of the cloud to
transform their business models
33 38
46
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 15
cover story
Private clouds witness surge in adoption
Evidence on the ground indicates that a host of Indian enterprises are gradually taking
a stepping stone into the cloud by building their own private clouds
By Srikanth RP
Though the evidence is still small, the
rising adoption of private clouds across
a number of sectors indicates that Indian
enterprises are seriously considering the
private cloud as a fundamental part of
their compute infrastructure. While the
initial surge was predictably led by the
IT sector, the current evidence indicates
that private clouds are blooming in parts
in other sectors too. As InformationWeek
scouted for real examples on the
ground, we were pleasantly surprised at
the number of organizations who had
deployed a private cloud. (See box: Who
is using the private cloud)
Five years ago, when Indian
enterprises started looking at
squeezing out more value from their IT
infrastructure, they found an able ally
in a technology called ‘virtualization’.
The benefits of this technology were
amplified in recessionary times,
when CIOs were asked by their top
management to rein in costs, while
still maintaining the ability to support
growth. Today, even as the economy is
gradually limping back to normalcy, CIOs
are now looking at private clouds as a
method to flexibly and cost effectively
deliver services and resources from a
single point.
IT sector leads adoption
Most Indian CIOs are looking at private
clouds as a stepping stone into the world
of cloud computing, as private clouds
deliver the same benefits of elasticity
and standardization, while adhering to
security and compliance needs. As the
cloud enables standardization, CIOs
have the ability to quickly provision
infrastructure or applications according
to business needs.
For companies in the IT services
16 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
sector, provisioning of project
infrastructure is perhaps one of the most
important pieces in getting a project
quickly executed. This is also one of
the most challenging tasks, as most
companies in this sector execute distinct
projects for multiple clients spread over
multiple countries. As projects can be
short in duration, the IT team has less
time for provisioning infrastructure
according to dynamic needs. Any delay
in provisioning the required hardware
affects project delivery. Similarly,
ineffective utilization of hardware
infrastructure affects the margins of the
projects.
Ramping up and scaling down project
infrastructure based on project needs
is also not possible with the traditional
model. A private cloud is a perfect model
for companies in the IT sector as it helps
in addressing the challenges of providing
infrastructure quickly. From the initial
statistics shared with us by some of the
leading IT companies, we can gauge the
huge benefits that a private cloud can
offer to an enterprise.
For example, Infosys’ private cloud
christened ‘MyCloud’, has the ability
to host around 3,000 virtual machines
(VMs) with an easy-to-use ‘Self-Service’
portal and template-based provisioning.
Infosys is looking at substituting
“Compared to a typical 46 day period for
provisioning infrastructure for a project,
we can now achieve the same task in
just 35 minutes”
Laxman Badiga, CIO, Wipro Technologies
additional desktops and servers that are
physically installed in server rooms with
these VMs. Due to the internal cloud,
the allocation time for providing project
infrastructure has been reduced from
two days to eight hours. A previous
machine snapshot can be restored
within five minutes in case of disaster.
The speed and agility that a private
cloud can deliver can be seen from the
example of Infosys. Using the private
cloud infrastructure, Infosys could build
twin data centers in a record time of 5.5
months with more than 30 services and
two clients going live. More importantly,
the deployment resulted in major cost
savings for Infosys with more than 50
percent reduction in the effort cost of
leveraging Infosys’ Global Delivery Model.
Similarly, Wipro has documented
savings of slashing the time taken for
provisioning infrastructure using a self-
service portal environment. “The private
cloud has helped us in faster provisioning
of resources for our projects. Today,
compared to a typical 46 day period for
provisioning infrastructure for a project,
we can now achieve the same task in just
35 minutes,” says Laxman Badiga, CIO,
Wipro Technologies. Badiga says that
the process of identifying, procuring and
provisioning resources has been reduced
to just sending a request. The resources
www.informationweek.in
are readily provisioned and available for
use. Wipro today has more than 1,500
virtual servers running on the cloud.
Patni has a similar experience.
Satish Joshi, Executive Vice-President
and Global Head Technology, Patni,
tells us that the time for provisioning
infrastructure has gone down from
weeks to a few hours. “Today, we can
provision development and testing
environments for new applications within
a few hours,” says Joshi.
Private clouds also provide software
services companies a perfect platform to
rapidly launch new services. For example,
Hexaware recently announced the launch
of its cloud service, wherein it proposed
to offer clients services in the space of
IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The foundation
for launching these services is a private
cloud, built using NetApp’s multi- tenant
storage solutions and VMware’s vCloud
Director.
“Historically, a typical IT person
spends close to 70 percent of his
time in application and infrastructure
maintenance related activities. A
private cloud enables an IT professional
to reduce time on maintenance, and
concentrate instead on innovation,”
emphasizes N Nataraj, CIO, Hexaware
Technologies.
Given the extreme competitiveness
of the companies in the IT services
sector, the utilization and reusability of
the hardware and software infrastructure
is crucial.
“Earlier with a traditional approach,
we were purchasing dedicated stacks
which we had to live with for three to
five years. Today, with the power and
flexibility of private cloud, we can now
configure and re-configure resources
“A private cloud enables an IT
professional to reduce time on
maintenance, and concentrate instead
on innovation”
N Nataraj, CIO, Hexaware Technologies
“With the power and flexibility of
private cloud, we can now configure and
re-configure resources based on demand
and utilization”
Vikas Gupta, VP-IT, Tech Mahindra
based on demand and utilization. I would
say, with highly virtualized pools of
compute, network and storage, we have
become more flexible and agile,” says
Tech Mahindra’s VP for IT, Vikas Gupta,
vouching for the benefit of a private
cloud.
As Tech Mahindra has a huge focus
on the telecom sector, it is leveraging its
experience learnt while building private
clouds, and using this to service clients
effectively.
“We have seen that the resource
and workload demand is cyclical in Tech
Mahindra because it is purely driven
by business demand. To leverage the
power of private clouds, we have started
working on porting our applications
to private cloud, some of them being
specific to the Telco market we target,”
explains Gupta.
Today, with the adoption of private
clouds, the IT function can deliver
what the business wants as a catalog
of services. Gupta says that this
has completely changed the overall
conversation and approach with which
the IT function interacts with the
business for their technology related
needs. The business can choose from
the catalog of services making them
more competitive and agile, while the
IT function can concentrate its time
on innovation, rather than focusing on
maintenance-related activities.
Private clouds develop
roots in education sector
Clouds are also well suited for
educational institutes, as most
institutions are today struggling to
securely and cost effectively provide IT
infrastructure. Take the case of Sardar
Patel Institute of Technology, a Mumbai
based-educational institution.
In an educational institution such as
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, labs
are set up as per subject requirements
and as there is no separate lab for
individual subjects, every machine
is installed with multiple heavy
applications. This is a headache for a lab
assistant, as he or she has to reconfigure
every machine for addition of new
software or to upgrade existing software.
Educational institutions also grapple with
the problem of extensive usage of pen-
drive in college labs, which is the main
source of virus problems.
Typically, final year students
are provided dedicated desktops for
their final year project. They submit
a CD containing source code and
documentation of project during
submission. Setting up the production
environment for the projects is hence
difficult after the students pass out.
There is a need for effective storage
of projects, which is the institution’s
Intellectual Property (IP).
Using Eucalyptus Systems’ private
cloud solution, the institute has built an
internal, private cloud based on open
source technologies and compatible
with Amazon’s cloud services. Some of
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 17
cover story
the existing desktops were clustered to
create the cloud infrastructure and no
additional hardware had to be purchased.
The institute has been one of
the early adopters in the educational
sector to adopt an open source-based
private cloud. “Post deployment, we
can create machine instances on-the-fly
and create an infrastructure according
to requirements. The adoption of the
private cloud has also helped in cutting
our annual IT budget by 70 percent,”
explains Dr Deven Shah, HOD, IT
Department, Sardar Patel Institute of
Technology.
The private cloud also allows
students to launch multiple virtual
machine instances (based on various
practical experiments) from any
computer system. A student can attach
her storage space to that particular
instance to save any work done. In case
a particular instance gets infected by
a virus, the infection remains in that
particular instance, and does not affect
other running instances. This ensures a
higher level of security. The deployment
has also allowed the college to ensure
optimum usage of bandwidth. Each
virtual machine instance is allotted a
fixed amount of Internet bandwidth,
restricted to a few MBs in terms of
data transfer caps. This ensures that
students do not misuse the connectivity
to download large multimedia files or
software or surf unauthorized websites.
Today, each student has his own storage
space in the cloud. Students can use the
cloud storage space to store their daily
experiments. College projects are also
available to the college for reference
even after the student attains his degree.
More recently, IIT Delhi also set up
“Post deployment of the private cloud,
we can create machine instances
on-the-fly and create an infrastructure
according to requirements”
Dr Deven Shah, HOD, IT Department,
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
18 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
“A private cloud model was chosen to
ensure the desired levels of security
and high availability as the healthcare
demand for data security and SLAs are
extremely stringent”
Dr Neena Pahuja, CIO, Max Healthcare Institute
a private cloud with implementation
assistance from Progressive Infotech.
The computer centre of IIT has always
received high demand being a research-
oriented institute of higher learning
– and a private cloud deployment will
enable the institute to move around
workloads easily for load balancing
purposes and to allocate computing
resources. One of the major benefits of
the private cloud will be in the area of
critical research or consulting projects
that need high computing requirements
and some repetitive experimentation.
After the deployment of the virtual
machines, the old data can be stored and
reused as and when required.
The same benefits, that these
educational institutions have realized
with private clouds, can be amplified
when large associations leverage the
cloud. For example, universities and
state-education departments can share
their infrastructure and create a private
cloud.
A healthy outlook for
healthcare
In a recent report, management
consulting firm, Zinnov estimated that
the cloud could potentially address
close to 40 percent of the total annual
healthcare IT spending in India.
Zinnov believes that the healthcare
infrastructure in India is currently
chasing a 50 percent gap compared to its
global peers. This necessitates an urgent
need to scale up the infrastructure to
cater to a population of over a billion.
Apart from the various
administrative hospital functions that
can be standardized and delivered using
a cloud-based solution, the research
undertaken by Zinnov estimates that the
cloud can lower IT infrastructure cost by
approximately 30 percent.
With typical concerns of data
security, integrity and availability, the
‘private’ cloud is a preferred option for
organizations in the healthcare sector.
This is corroborated by a recent KPMG
report titled, ‘The Cloud: Changing the
Business Ecosystem’.
The report states, “Considering
that the nature of the business involves
the management of highly sensitive
patient data; most healthcare providers
are exploring a private cloud. Until
the concept of the cloud gathers
enough acceptance across industries,
pharmaceutical companies are expected
to primarily resort to the comforts of the
environment of a private cloud”. A case
in point is Max Healthcare, which has
partnered with Dell Services, to convert
its IT infrastructure of all eight Max
Healthcare facilities into a private cloud
running remotely from Dell Services Data
Center.
Explaining the need for creating a
private cloud, Dr Neena Pahuja, CIO,
Max Healthcare Institute, says, “Max
Healthcare is growing fast and our four
new hospitals will be operational by the
third quarter of this year — doubling
www.informationweek.in
our current bed capacity. We wanted
to create a scalable IT environment to
support our growth and hence decided to
go in for a cloud environment. A private
cloud model was chosen to ensure
the desired levels of security and high
availability as the healthcare demand
for data security and SLAs are very
stringent.”
The ease of information access
and the agility in provisioning IT
infrastructure is a huge advantage.
Dr Pahuja cites one example that
demonstrates the true power of the
cloud.
“Some of our clinicians just love
this as it allows them to see patient
data anywhere on their Blackberries,
iPhones or iPads. In one case, a doctor
was remotely able to diagnose a bleeding
patient brought in trauma in the early
hours of day, without rushing to the
hospital. The timely diagnosis helped
in getting immediate treatment to the
patient.”
Currently, Max Healthcare has
deployed its Hospital Information System
on the cloud, and is planning to rollout
its Electronic Health Care System (EHR)
on the private cloud.
The future clearly lies in federated
or community clouds. For example, in
the US, some large hospitals are coming
together to build community clouds.
In this case, the cloud infrastructure is
shared by organizations in a specific
community. A case in point is Toronto-
based Mount Sinai Hospital, which has
set up a community cloud to serve 14
other hospitals in the area. The federated
cloud provides individual hospitals
access to an ultrasound application that
is too expensive for each hospital to buy
individually.
Helping the retail sector
manage crests and troughs
A shared central infrastructure enabled

Who is using the private cloud?

Sector Organization Usage / Benefit

Infosys Allocation time for providing project infrastructure has been reduced from
two days to eight hours. A previous machine snapshot can be restored
within five minutes in case of disaster. The deployment has resulted in
major cost savings for Infosys with more than 50 percent reduction in the
effort cost of leveraging Infosys’ Global Delivery Model.

IT
Wipro Compared to a 46 day period for provisioning infrastructure for a project,
the same infrastructure can now be provisioned in just 35 minutes.

Sardar Patel Institute The adoption of the private cloud has helped in cutting the annual IT budget
of Technology by 70 percent. The private cloud also allows students to launch multiple
virtual machine instances from any computer system

IIT Delhi One of the major benefits of the private cloud will be in the area of critical
research or consulting projects that need high computing requirements and
Education
some repetitive experimentation.

Max Healthcare The private cloud allows Max Healthcare to set up its process and tools
at new facilities easily, as these facilities get access to Max’s Hospital
Information Management System by just hooking up to the cloud.
Healthcare

Shoppers Stop Will help the organization to match the pace of growth without a
commensurate increase in data center assets

Retail

The Kerala State The Kerala State IT Mission has signed a tri-partite agreement with
IT Mission IIITM-K and C-DAC, Chennai (C-DAC) for testing applications such as
SPARK (State Pay roll and Personnel Management System) on a private
Goverment cloud

march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 19
cover story
by a private cloud is beneficial for
retailers, as it gives them not only
faster access to customer data, but is
also helpful in rolling out new product
initiatives. A case in point is Shoppers
Stop, a pioneer in modern retailing.
“The retail industry is now in an
expansion mode with the economy
looking up. As we expand our business
operations, scalability of the data
center infrastructure was one of the key
requirements identified. The business
need for deploying a private cloud was
driven by resilience, variable load factors
of various applications, data center
consolidation and potential savings from
clouds,” explains Arun Gupta, Group
Chief Technology Officer at Shoppers
Stop. Gupta says that the private cloud
deployment has enabled his firm to
save on capital investments by almost
40 percent. More importantly, even as
business continues to grow, there is no
commensurate increase in data center
assets.
A cloud for the government
Looking at the typical scale that a
government institution works, the
cloud has huge potential to deliver
huge efficiencies. For example, the
Government of Kerala is testing out a
private cloud. The Kerala State IT Mission
has signed a tri-partite agreement
with Indian Institute of Information
Technology and Management-Kerala
(IIITM-K) and Centre for Development
of Advanced Computing, Chennai
(C-DAC). In the first phase of the
project, IIITM-K and C-DAC are setting
up a cloud test-bed. Accordingly, the
initiative hopes to onboard on the cloud
projects or applications which require
“The business need for deploying a
private cloud was driven by resilience,
variable load factors of applications,
data center consolidation and potential
savings from clouds”
Arun Gupta, Group CTO, Shoppers Stop
20 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
better performance, responsiveness and
scalability with varying load.
Dr Ajay Kumar, Principal Secretary
(Information Technology), Government
of Kerala, shares the example of
SPARK (State Payroll and Personnel
Management System), which is used by
nearly 5.5 lakh government employees
of the state. This application requires
huge amount of computing resources
during the peak period of computation
which happens during the last week of
the month. Such applications may face
problems of poor response time of the
system due to want of resources. He
also cites the examples of applications
in the education department, which
handle functions such as common
admission counseling and results. These
applications register heavy traffic only at
the time of admission or results. In other
periods, the system remains idle.
“We have chosen SPARK application
for testing because there are 2 lakh
users. The application receives close to
3 to 6 crore hits during the last week
of every month and we believe that
this will be five times more by 2011. In
such applications, pooling of computing
resources would facilitate faster
operations and only when resources are
actually needed,” explains Dr Kumar on
how the cloud model can drive further
efficiencies.
Another initiative, that has the
potential to usher in huge efficiencies
across government organizations, is a
pioneering step taken by NIC. The Open
Technology Group at NIC, Chennai is
testing out a private cloud using Ubuntu
Enterprise cloud with the help of CSS
Corp. “Our goal is to reduce hardware
cost, save infrastructure setup and
maintenance costs,” says Senthil Kumar,
Technical Director, OTG, NIC, Chennai.
The private cloud is being tested for
running some of the e-governance
projects. Once the testing is fully
complete, the team plans to submit
the outcome of this setup to the top
management, who then will take a call on
deploying this infrastructure across the
country.
Early adopters will boost
confidence
For the past few months, we have been
asked the question, ‘Is the cloud real or
a big marketing hype?’. When we started
out exploring this story, we were not
sure of the number of Indian companies
that had deployed a private cloud. After
talking to vendors and a huge number of
CIOs, we can definitely say that the cloud
will be a vital part of a CIO’s business IT
strategy in the years to come.
Some CIOs, that we spoke to, say
that companies in the SMB sector will be
the first to adopt the cloud. Government
is another sector where we will see cloud
adoption. And of course, there is the
emergence of federated clouds. Large
enterprises, that have made significant
investment in infrastructure, will
seriously consider the cloud during the
next refresh/upgrade cycle. Gartner has
said that enterprises will also implement
Hybrid clouds.
While the evidence of companies
who have implemented a private
cloud is still at an extremely small
scale, the acceptance of the model
by organizations across the industry
spectrum proves that the private cloud
model will be a vital part of the compute
infrastructure. Hopefully, the early
adopters will convince the fence sitters
that the cloud story is here to stay, and
the private cloud is a big stepping stone
for organizations that truly want to
experience the power of the cloud. n
Srikanth RP (srikanth.rp@ubm.com)
www.informationweek.in
cover story
Rains from private clouds
percolate to SMBs
T
he true sign of a technology being adopted is when
smaller enterprises start implementing a particular
technology for maximizing business value. A case in
point is Somnet Dynagraphics, a small IT solutions firm that
has built a private cloud using open source.
Says Shantanu Som, Director-Technical, Somnet
Dynagraphics, “Our sales people can now load data in CRM
from anywhere, which entirely runs on cloud. Our support
engineers get support tickets via SMS on their mobile while
on the move, bettering their response time and increasing
customer satisfaction.” Som says that the open source
framework has given his firm low TCO. “Now, we have
more employee engagement which translates into higher
operational efficiency. Less IT investment per employee is also
another motivational factor.” To enhance security, Somnet
uses 128 bit encryption and OTP (One Time Password). The
OTP reaches a user via a SMS. This provides a high security
environment, even if employees use an Internet café.
The scalability of the private cloud makes it apt for
SMBs. “One of our business units supports around 2,200
installations of high-end multifunction devices and this
is a customer intensive operation. We manage the entire
operation and workflows of that unit with our own solution
“Due to the private cloud,
we have more employee
engagement which
translates into higher
operational efficiency”
Shantanu Som, Director-Technical,
Somnet Dynagraphics
22 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
which also has a self service module for all 2,200 users.
This is a complex requirement as most of the workflows and
business reports are extremely customized,” explains Som,
on why a private cloud makes sense for his enterprise.
Another case in point is True Value Homes, a fast
growing construction company. The pace of growth of the
organization can be seen from the fact that the company
has completed 4 million square feet of cumulative
construction and has projects covering about 12 million
square feet in the pipeline—9 million in residential and 3
million in commercial property. Every year, the firm has
plans to achieve a target of building 2.5 million square feet.
For this organization, meeting IT infrastructure
requirements with the pace of growth is a challenging
task. A private cloud is apt as it gives the firm the ability to
quickly deliver infrastructure requirements from a central
location. “Whenever a new site comes up, it takes only two
minutes to provide infrastructure and access to end users,”
exclaims Arun Mehru, Director-Procurement and IT, True
Value Homes. Mehru marks ‘security’ as the biggest draw of
the private cloud as it helps the IT function in centralizing
and monitoring user access. True Value has built the private
cloud using hardware from IBM. n
“Whenever a new site
comes up, it takes only
two minutes to provide
infrastructure and access
to end users”
Arun Mehru, Director-Procurement and IT,
True Value Homes
www.informationweek.in
Cloud
Views Leading CIOs share their views on
what they are doing on the cloud
Vijay Sethi, Vice President virtualization in India we will leapfrog from compute on
– Information Systems, physical servers to private or hybrid clouds. The rest
Hero Honda of the world went through the cloud evolution, by first
We have set up a dealer consolidating servers, then virtualizing data centers,
management system then deploying a private cloud, and then getting into a
wherein our vast network federation between private and public cloud.
of dealers can VPN into
our corporate system.
We are now looking at Ravinder Jain, CIO, Aircel
extending this on the SaaS This year we will focus on Cloud and we are considering
platform. For me, IaaS and PaaS the SaaS model and eventually PaaS. But we are not
do not make sense now since I have already made opting for the hosting model.
investments in on-premise infrastructure.

Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS

Vishnu Bhat, Vice President and Head, Systems We have our data centers in
Integration, Infosys Technologies Chennai and Noida. We are
offering our customers
Government clouds data backup services
Some of our key customers are in the Government on the cloud. They can
sector. We see a lot of traction happening in the connect their data cards
Government sector, especially in the West and this trend to the laptop and install a
will pick up here too. Worldwide, we are talking to several small piece of software. It
Government institutions for cloud services. For instance, would then scan all folders
we worked with a city in Florida where we moved on their desktop or laptop and
their entire applications and document management the next time he connects to our public data switching
into a Google cloud. We see a similar trend for citizen network his folders would be backed up in our data
services in India as well. We are in discussions with the center. This service is targeted at SOHOs, SMEs and high
government of India now. networth individuals (HNIs) who are not particular about
things like compliance.
Other sectors
We have more than 40 customer engagements now. We
are seeing major interests in the retail segment, banking David Wirt, Global Product Head, Tata
and capital markets, manufacturing (especially the high- Communications
tech manufacturing companies). Now we are also seeing The private cloud market will be bigger than that of
interest in cloud in the Energy and Utility space, and the public clouds. You will see more of managed hosting
insurance sector. environments that will have a toolset on top with cloud
like attributes. But the pricing models will be very
different and the ability to burst up and down will be
Kunwar Kishore, Head of Data Centres - Bharti much different than a public cloud offering. That’s why
Airtel hybrid clouds are a critical element of any company’s
In 2009, the number of virtual servers deployed in strategy.
enterprises far exceeded the number of physical servers
shipped. With companies moving straight to server — As told to Brian Pereira

march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 23
cover story

Tales from the cloud:

Lessons from the trenches
For Indian enterprises, the cloud is a huge opportunity as well as a huge challenge.
To help understand how Indian CIOs can effectively face ‘cloud’ thunderstorms,
InformationWeek spoke to CIOs who have built their own private clouds. Reproduced
below are insights, lessons and unique experiences that hopefully will serve as
reference points for moving on to the cloud

Laxman Badiga, CIO, Wipro Technologies

Every cloud is a virtualized environment. The real essence of a private cloud is in making it
dynamically expandable, and how we can reclaim and reuse IT infrastructure in a more efficient
manner.
When you are moving from a traditional approach to the cloud, the whole mindset has
to completely change. For example, with the private cloud, users can request provisioning
of infrastructure using a self-service module. Left unmonitored, this can quickly lead to a
virtual machine sprawl. As the IT function, we expect the user to be disciplined, while the
user expects the IT function to manage this. We learnt a lot from these experiences, while
building the private cloud. In essence, you need to have a robust governance mechanism to
fully gain from the benefits of a private cloud

Sharad Sadadekar, AVP - Information Security and Technical Services,

HDFC Standard Life Insurance
IT leaders should consider five major phases when considering cloud computing:
l Build Business Case: Business case has to be based on business needs and
enhancing operational efficiency without any major impact on the regular
operational activities. Gain support from senior business leaders and senior
stakeholders. Build a cost benefit analysis and then estimate costs and resource
requirements.
l Value Delivery: Align the project case with the business strategy, and show how it
can deliver business value. Inform about the possible changes that will affect your
business environment.
l Readiness: Identify the budgetary, staffing, technology and other requirements necessary
to prepare the business. Develop a total cost of ownership analysis framework. Review established policies for assessing risk
and managing governance.
l Proof of Concept: Identify a group to pilot, or develop a prototype or a use case. Develop and communicate detailed
requirements. Manage the pilot/prototype. Access and communicate the results.
l Approval and Signoffs: Analyze findings of the readiness assessment and pilot or prototype effort, and revise the strategy and
business case accordingly. Present findings to senior stakeholders and business leaders.

24 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
 Satish Joshi, Executive Vice-President and Global Head Technology, Patni
The first step in creating a private cloud is a strong assessment and inventory creation of what
computing capacity is installed and what portion is in use. Geographical distribution is an
important component of the assessment. Technology diversity is another. Contractual obligation
is the third dimension wherein an enterprise has to maintain boundaries between different
compute environments despite technological similarities.
The most important issue to be tackled when moving to a cloud environment is change
management which is an important time consuming constraint.

Vikas Gupta, Vice-President, Technology, Tech
Mahindra
As a first stepping stone to private cloud, I would suggest that
an organization must start by looking out for opportunities to
virtualize server farms. Anything that comes for any new Tech
Mahindra site is now on a virtualized stack and there are simply
no exceptions to it. Another important thing is to rationalize
your application stack, we did an internal study of our
application stack and found out that we had about 42 percent
of applications which were seldom used but they were eating
valuable company resources.
I am better equipped and informed today and can quickly
take a decision to keep an application on-premise or off-
premise. If you want to get ready for private cloud tomorrow
start thinking of introducing hardware standardization when
buying new hardware, keeping limited room for exceptions.
About two years back, we decided to buy standardized hardware
only, which has proven to be cost-effective to us in terms
of management and procurement. We are now working on
centralizing and automating the management piece of it. Our
information systems teams are relooking at IT processes to
orchestrate appropriately.
It is also equally important to look at your processes and
complete lifecycle of rending services to business. If your IT
resource demands are not really elastic or cyclic you would be
better off waiting for some more time before deploying your
own private cloud. I suggest building a catalog of services as
we did, to attach cost and SLA to each service and then do an
analysis of various business units’ cost consumption. This is a
great tool to find out if a certain area of business or a business
unit is proving to be more profitable to the organization
compared to other businesses. This may help the top
management in focusing on that piece of business, though this
is not the only thing to look at to be able to take a decision in
this area, but this is a good way to show at least in theory what
the IT costs are, for a particular line of business.
The biggest challenge for Tech Mahindra was to convince
business units to buy the idea of
cloud itself. We don’t practice
charging back our business
units for the IT services
rendered to them by my
group, TIM (Technical
Infrastructure
Management). The
problem is that everyone
wants a piece of hardware
dedicated to them not
worrying about cost too
much. We worked out a
cost structure of IT services offered
to various business units and starting showing them how much
these services cost based on their consumption.
This notion of ‘theoretical chargeback’ helped us convince
them stick to the idea of not going for an exception. I must
admit that the business unit heads really supported us when
we told them how much they were investing on the IT services
by doing exceptions. My team faced some teething issues
of building capacity on managing cloud so we had to invest
in sending them to trainings. While we are building skills
internally for cloud, our resource management group is in sync
with our future cloud related requirements and is mandated
to hire resources appropriately. Lastly, while rationalizing
applications the teams have been asked to carefully look at
the frameworks the applications are dependent on. My team
has implemented an open source private cloud solution in
one of our biggest data centers based in the Western part of
India to address typical vendor lock-in issues related to private
cloud. Our developers are building new applications for the
cloud which are not dependent on vendor’s cloud tools and are
framework agnostic as much as possible.
Keep in mind that the play is public cloud in future so,
private cloud is really just a stepping stone in the journey. Tech
Mahindra is operating in hybrid model today wherein we are
running a mix of private, public and non-cloud based services.

march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 25
 Dr Deven Shah, HOD, IT Department, Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
We used a cache system to improve user experience. For example, when a user launches a
virtual machine he has to wait for some time (loading and booting time), till he gets access
to it. To reduce the time, we included a cache system where lab administrators can cache
virtual machines depending upon the anticipated usage

Arun Gupta, Group CTO, Shoppers Stop

Enterprises must start small with some basic off-the-shelf applications which can be easily installed
and tested on virtual servers. The next step would be to rigorously test the development and test
environments before moving to production. Check your licenses and the impact when moving
from physical to virtual environment. Take up the opportunity when you are planning refresh or
new servers. Challenge the application providers to work with you to deploy solutions in the
cloud. All providers of cloud solutions have a story to tell and work; your choice would be
dependent on the technology stack within the enterprise. Don’t just go by what vendors tell
you; see and experience it for yourself.
Challenges are largely with scalability as promised by vendors as well as by applications.
Some of them do not work as promised. Find system integrators who have been there and
remember they may not be your usual big IT companies or your current vendor. We worked
with principal technology companies and asked them to own the integration and complete
migration.
— As told to Srikanth RP

Viva Infomedia leverages the cloud for managing rising volumes

The firm has used Netmagic’s cloud infrastructure to transform its static SMS transaction infrastructure
A fast emerging provider of information products and
services, Viva Infomedia specializes in providing customized
leads and direct marketing activities using mediums such as
SMS and interactive media. With business growing fast, the
firm faced a huge challenge in scaling up the infrastructure
according to growing business requirements.
The firm’s dedicated server could not handle the
increasing business load. There were also scalability issues
with the server not being able to cope with peak time traffic
of SMS transactions, especially on weekends.
To address these issues, the firm decided to adopt a
cloud computing platform to meet peak time surges in
SMS transactions. After testing out the service offerings of
various cloud based providers, Viva Infomedia zeroed in on
Netmagic.
Netmagic partnered with Viva Infomedia to migrate its
entire SMS transactions infrastructure. Today, Viva Infomedia
can handle fluctuating business loads through superior
scalability provided by the cloud-based platform by simply
switching to parallel servers and raising a PO to increase
infrastructure.
The elasticity provided by the cloud-based service
is apt for a firm like Viva Infomedia, as it can efficiently
accommodate rapidly growing transaction loads using a cloud
computing platform. It also gives the ability to attain high
levels of server scalability on demand and meet peak time
surges in SMS transactions.
Vikram Rai, MD, Viva Infomedia, explains this with the
help of an example. “When we set up in 2009, our volumes
were around 20 lakhs SMSs a month. Today, it is more than
20 crores per month. The cloud service from Netmagic has
definitely given us the benefit of scalability while being cost
effective.”
In addition to scalability of infrastructure, the cloud also
gives a firm like Viva Infomedia the ability to archive huge
amounts of data quickly.

26 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
cover story
How Partner Ecosystems
are shaping the Cloud
Telcos, ISVs, SIs, OEMs, cloud aggregators and platform providers are forging
strategic partnerships and creating cloud ecosystems. All this will help the enterprise
accelerate its journey to the cloud
By Brian Pereira
They say marriages are made in
heaven. Well, great partnerships in
the IT industry occur more down to
earth, like in the clouds. While Indian
enterprises are yet to migrate to the
cloud in droves, cloud enablers and
solutions providers are hard at work
getting their solutions and platforms
ready. We spoke to various entities in
the industry about their partnerships
and strategic alliances—they all
emphasized the importance of tightly
integrating all pieces of the cloud
offering. And to make this possible
vendors and service providers are
28 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
forming their own partner ecosystems.
In a partner ecosystem various
partner entities bring their technologies
and products together and back this
with their combined strengths in
integration, technology consulting,
services, sales and marketing. The
result: a win-win situation for all
entities, and a-one-stop shop for
customers, backed by a single SLA and a
single point of support.
Let’s talk about the technology
vendors first. The traditional approach
is to sell products to customers through
the channel. Now vendors are extending
their channel programs to include
service providers.
Take the case of NetApp, a vendor
of enterprise storage systems and
technologies. In 2010 NetApp extended
its channel partner program to include
cloud service providers. It works
closely with service providers like HCL
Infosystems.
A release from NetApp says service
providers who join the NetApp Partner
Program benefit by “gaining access
to a wide range of unique tools and
programs delivered by NetApp.” This
includes technical training and service
www.informationweek.in
benefits, as well as marketing and sales
support. We elaborate later in this
article.
The new trend is summarized
well by George Paul, Executive Vice-
President, HCL Infosystems. “Gone are
the days where the complete vertical
integration came from one organization.
Today you have the product and
technology players. Then there are
experts in the areas of middleware, SI,
and in the application space. As an SI we
design the solution, take this technology
piece of NetApp and build into it,” said
Paul.
NetApp works closely with SIs,
telcos and cloud aggregators who
deliver cloud services. It assists their
technical operations team to use its
assets “in an efficient manner” so that
they “deliver more by using less storage
capacity”. This is what it calls the
“technical enablement”.
Explaining the unique features of
its partner program, Rajesh Awasthi,
Director- Telecom and Cloud Service
Provider, NetApp said, “Through this
program we help service providers
to ‘productize’ some of the services
based on NetApp technology. We help
them in reducing the time to market by
sharing the best practices on NetApp
technology.”
Interestingly, NetApp also offers
training for the service provider’s sales
teams, who may be good at selling say,
voice services, but are not acquainted at
selling IT services. This is what it calls
the “sales enablement.”
Beyond this NetApp works with
the service provider’s marketing team
for demand generation. It executes
joint marketing events for creating
platforms to create demand generation
“Gone are the days where the complete
vertical integration came from one
organization. Today you have product
and technology players, and experts.”
George Paul, Executive Vice-President, HCL Infosystems
“We help service providers ‘productize’
their services based on NetApp
technology.We help them reduce the time
to market by sharing best practices”
Rajesh Awasthi, Director- Telecom and Cloud Service
Provider, NetApp
for these services and even offers a
development fund for service providers.
And finally, it does a joint go-to-market
with the service provider (from the sales
perspective).
Partners in the ecosystem may
also bundle and cross-sell each other’s
offerings. A technology vendor may sell
the services of an SI or telco to its own
customers, for instance. It may use its
own channel for this purpose, as in the
case of NetApp.
These types of partner arrangements
are win-win for all entities in the
ecosystem as some may not have
the expertise in selling, or lack skilled
manpower for L2 and L3 support. Such
arrangements can also reduce their
CAPEX drastically.
Apart from using or selling each
other’s products the partners might also
go in for a revenue sharing arrangement
for the product or service that’s
delivered as a whole to the customer.
Another example is VMware. The
virtualization technology pioneer
works with service providers and has
established its own partner program
called VMware Service Provider
Program (VSSP). It is positioning VSSP
as a framework that allows service and
hosting providers to consume VMware
virtualization solutions in a way that
aligns with their business model.
Informs Ganesan Arumugam,
Director–Partners, VMware India,
“VMware owes much of its success to
its global partner ecosystem, which
includes more than 1,500 technology
partners, more than 2,600 service
provider partners and nearly 25,000
channel partners. VMware teams with
industry-leading hardware and software
companies to optimize selected
technology and solutions with VMware
software. Global Alliance Partners
integrate their hardware and software
with VMware technology, support their
products running on VMware virtual
machines and co-sell and/or resell
VMware products. Cisco, AMD, Fujitsu,
IBM, HP are few companies to name
among our global alliance partners.”
LEVELS OF PARTNERSHIP
There are certain partner entities that
focus on their core competencies,
such as technology consulting or
systems integration, and depend on
others for the hosting infrastructure.
In such instances it is imperative to
work with partners at different levels.
A case in point is Infosys Technologies
(See Infosys converts cloud threat
into opportunity in InformationWeek,
January 2011.)
Infosys offers a plethora of cloud
services ranging from its own SaaS
offerings to cloud service aggregation
and migration, building private clouds
for customers, and cloud service
orchestration. Yet it does not build its
own data centers for these services.
Instead, it has strategic alliances with
over 20 partners at different levels.
Says Vishnu Bhat, Vice President
and Head, Systems Integration,
Infosys Technologies, “Our strategic
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 29
cover story

partners can be classified in three or
four strategic buckets. At one bucket
we have a partner that provides
infrastructure clouds (IaaS), and the
example is Amazon. At another level
we partner with PaaS providers like
Microsoft (Azure). The third bucket
comprises technology providers such as
IBM, HP, CA, Novell, VMware, Salesforce.
com and Hitachi Data Systems. We
also work with third parties to bring in
SaaS offerings. It could also be our own
applications (like HR-in-a-box) or theirs.”
Tata Communications has an
alliance with Google to deliver its own
SaaS products. In October 2010 Tata
Communications launched InstaApps
and InstaCompute (both are public cloud
offerings). InstaApps is built on the
Google Apps platform. These apps will
soon be adapted for private clouds.
“Being a network provider Tata
Communications wants to leverage on
its global networking expertise and offer
IaaS and SaaS services for SMBs out
of its data centers in Hyderabad, and
soon in Singapore. We will partner with
an SI for the integration services,” said
David Wirt, Global Product Head, Tata
Communications.
Tata Communications is pursuing
the lucrative opportunity in India’s SMB
“VMware owes its success to its global
partner ecosystem, which includes more
than 1,500 technology partners, more
than 2,600 service provider partners and
nearly 25,000 channel partners.”
Ganesan Arumugam, Director – Partners, VMware India
sector. According to estimates, there
are 14 million small and medium-sized
businesses in the country. It is also
aspiring for 25 percent of the Indian
cloud computing market, which will soon
be worth USD 1 billion.
Over the years the telecom
companies (telcos) invested heavily
in data center infrastructure and are
skilled at offering voice services. But
with the ARPU for voice calls shrinking
every year telecos are looking at data
services to recover these investments.
However, they may lack the expertise in
offering IT services, and hence depend
on an ecosystem of partners from the IT
industry.
For instance Infosys helped Aircel
launch its mobile app store last year.
And telecos are now talking to software
vendors for offering enterprise
applications like ERP through a
SaaS-based model. Partners from the
IT industry are also doing the cloud-
enablement for the telecos, as is the
case with Bharti Airtel.
Says Kunwar Kishore, Head of Data
Centres - Bharti Airtel, “When you are
working with best of breed partners the
ecosystem is the key. In the ecosystem
you need the virtualization fabric and
for this we partner with VMware. You
also need compute and storage fabrics.
And you need a service provider who
can tie all that together. While most
of the telcos have chosen to do this
themselves, we have partnered with
Savvis. They offer managed hosting
services, Web hosting and cloud
computing.”
Bharti Airtel’s enterprise customers
will also benefit from this partnership.

SIMPLIFYING THE CLOUD

While SIs, ISVs, Telcos, and OEMs get together and form
partner ecosystems, there are others who are working to simplify
the cloud experience for the customer. They are offering cloud
management tools, application hosting services and accelerators
for deployment of cloud services.
An example is MTaaS (Management Tools-as-a-service)
from HCL Technologies. MTaaS is a private cloud based
enterprise management platform for delivery of IT management
tools.
The journey to the cloud is not an easy one and it involves
many processes. Businesses that want to run and manage IT-
as-a-Service would have to define its processes, define all the
functional requirements from an IT management perspective and
then buy platform and managements tools, and integrate these.
This takes a lot of effort and is time-consuming, because they
also have to adopt frameworks and practices like ITIL.
But what if someone provided a Platform as a Service to
do all this? There would be no need to buy all these tools and
integrate them. How about a pre-configured platform so that the
business could forget about integration woes and just focus on
defining its key requirements?
“That would lead to a shift from implementing to
provisioning,” said Kalyan Kumar B, Global Practice Director
and Worldwide Head- Cross Functional Services Infrastructure
Management and Transformation Services, HCL Technologies.
“With MTaaS we give a pre-packaged offering that
includes systems management, network management, incident
management, application monitoring, IT service management,
templates, tresholds, console, monitoring etc. And then we put
all this together and offer it pre-packed — like software-as-a-
service. When we did that customers just went and “onboarded”
on to this platform. This really changed the way we did remote
infrastructure management,” added Kumar.
Of course, customers still need to define and develop their
requirements, but the effort required to do that is much less now
because it is pre-configured, pre-installed, and hosted out of
global data centers, informed Kumar.
MTaaS provides a service catalog for enterprise
management. HCL Technologies claims there are 70 plus G1000
customers for its MTaaS solution.

30 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
cover story
They will now have a user-friendly front-
end, a monitoring mechanism, and the
virtual fabric.
“They will be able to easily move the
virtual instances from one geography to
another, because they are on the same
fabric,” said Kishore.
CLOUD AGGREGATORS
Then there are Cloud Aggregators
like the start-up iManage Technology
Services (a subsidiary of iValue
InfoSolutions). iManage is a cloud
aggregator offering a platform. It
will offer various enterprise/SMB
applications from ISVs and combine
these with its expertise in technology
consulting. And all these will be hosted
in the data centers of its ISP, OEM and
MSP partners.
Explaining the business model,
Valerian Fernandes, co-founder, Director
& CEO, iManage Technology Services
said, “Our partners do not need to
invest in these technologies and do not
There are certain partner entities that focus on
their core competencies, such as technology
consulting or systems integration, and depend on
others for the hosting infrastructure
have to recruit skilled manpower. They
would only have to focus on taking
these services to customers. So they
can increase the average revenue per
user (ARPU). So service providers do
not need to invest into the technology,
or for highly skilled manpower. There is
no CAPEX for them.”
iManage offers a plethora of
services that include technology
consulting, compliance based
consulting, and subscription-based
managed IT services. It also offers cloud
computing through SaaS and PaaS
models. It presents a range of managed
services for micro-SMBs, SMBs and
large enterprises.
iManage wants to make it simple
for customers to help themselves to its
32 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
“In the ecosystem you need the
virtualization fabric.You also need
compute and storage fabrics. And you
need a service provider who can tie all
that together”
Kunwar Kishore, Head of Data Centres - Bharti Airtel
buffet of services, provisioning these
on demand, and then allowing them to
pay on a usage basis. And to enable this
it is building a front-end portal and the
platform; its iManage Web Store will be
launched in March 2011. The web store
would enable customers from anywhere
to pick a service or application that they
want to use for a certain amount of time
and pay for it ontime.
“Through the iManage Web Store
we would offer a base package for
micro SMEs. This would include CRM,
mail, anti-spam, anti-virus and backup.
There would also be services for SME
and enterprise customers,” informed
Fernandes.
POINT OF ACCOUNTABILITY
In an ecosystem of partners one of
the players becomes the single point
of accountability who is responsible
for quality of service and support for
the customer. That means he is also
liable for the performance issues of
the products or services from other
partners. How does the key partner
manage this and back it with SLAs?
“The strength of the relationship
with the partners becomes extremely
important here. A lot of this will be
backed by a strong agreement with
our partners. When you work with an
ecosystem of partners it is important
to ensure that there is always a backup
plan for everything,” says Bhat of
Infosys Technologies.
Infosys also mitigates the risk
by advising its customers to build an
asset set or cloud applications that are
interoperable. It feels there will be fewer
technical issues if the cloud applications
are not tied in to a specific cloud
platform or cloud provider.
“There should be a degree of
transportation possible as those assets
move from one cloud to another. And we
ensure this when we build clouds for our
customers,” added Bhat.
CONCLUSION
In the next few months we will see more
cloud services for enterprises. The
service providers and their partners are
going to make it easier for businesses
to cloud enable their applications and
processes.
We’ll also see radical changes in
channel programs and the way vendors
and service providers sell cloud services
to customers. It’s clear that the SMB
sector will benefit immensely from
these partnerships and gain more
confidence to embrace the cloud.
While some may have reservations
about cloud security, some aver that
security in the cloud will be on par or
better than what’s available on-premise.
After all, the cloud service providers
will have to uphold their reputation.
And great partnerships, water-tight
integration and trust that happen—
wright here on earth! n
Brian Pereira (brian.pereira@ubm.com)
www.informationweek.in
cover story
Cloud shines bright in the Indian skies
With cloud computing in India set to touch USD 1 billion by 2015, cloud vendors are
tapping every available opportunity, both in enterprises and SMEs, to scale up
their businesses
By Ayushman Baruah
They say a bird is born twice. Once,
when it comes out of the egg. Once
again, when it begins to fly. Consider
this, in the context of cloud computing.
Given the buzzword it has become,
cloud is certainly born and has come out
of the shell. But are the clouds soaring
high on the Indian skies yet?
According to India based research
firm Zinnov, the total cloud computing
market in India will grow almost
ten-fold to USD 1 billion by 2015 from
USD 110 million today. The report said
that in the cloud computing market
in India, software-as-a-service (SaaS)
has witnessed the most rapid uptake
so far. As components of the overall
cloud market, SaaS in India is likely to
reach a mark of USD 650 million by
2015, while platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
markets cumulatively would touch USD
434 million each by then.
One of the first milestones for
cloud computing was the inception of
Salesforce.com in 1999, which pioneered
the model of delivering enterprise
applications through a simple website.
Since then, Salesforce.com has become
the poster boy for the SaaS industry.
Realizing the nascent cloud opportunity,
Salesforce.com made its foray into the
Indian market in 2005. Many of India’s
leading systems integrators such as
TCS, Wipro, and Infosys have become
alliance partners of Salesforce.com.
The company’s flagship PaaS offering
Force.com offers a huge opportunity
to entrepreneurial developers working
in their spare time. There are 36,000
members in its India Developer
Community developing applications on
Force.com.
SaaS-based ERP market in India is
also picking up, reaching to the tune of
USD 7 million (2.2 percent of the overall
USD 310 million ERP market in India).
According to a survey, only 6 percent
of organizations implementing ERP
were deploying SaaS options in 2009.
However, this number nearly tripled to
17 percent in 2010. In addition to the 17
percent that deployed SaaS solutions,
another 24 percent implemented ERP
systems that are hosted off-site or in
the cloud. In other words, nearly half
of the companies implementing new
enterprise software are doing so in the
cloud.
Ramco launched its cloud-based
ERP–Ramco OnDemand ERP (RODE)
in 2008. In September last year, the
company announced the launch of
RODE 2.0, with significant addition of
functionalities, features, and modules.
“Currently we have over 2,000 users
from 300 plus client organizations for
our ERP on the cloud. We are expecting
“The private cloud will see high adoption
by large enterprises going forward. The
hybrid cloud archiving model will be
adopted to enable organizations to use
hosted messaging services”
Anand Naik, Director, Systems Engineering, Symantec
our total customer base to reach 285
plus by end of this fiscal,” says Sukumar
R, General Manager-Sales, Ramco
Systems. Some of Ramco’s customers
for Ramco OnDemand ERP are Birla
Tyres, RTE, Srinisons, and Lubrizol
among others.
Microsoft, world’s largest software
maker, was quick to move on to the
cloud route. Today the company
claims to have around 40 million paid
customers globally for its cloud-based
solutions, some of which include BPOS,
O365, Windows Intune, and CRM Online.
“BPOS in India already has 1,300
customers on board and we are adding
50-100 customers per month. HCL,
Infosys, and Wipro are among the
leading partners to provide value-
added services. We have over 700 plus
partners reselling BPOS,” says Pallavi
Kathuria, Director, Server Business
Group, Microsoft India. Some of its
customers in India include Lavasa,
ACME Tele Power, Dabur, among others.
Microsoft is devoting a lot of its
energy to the cloud. The software
major’s chief Steve Balmer has claimed
many times that computing is moving
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 33
cover story
towards ‘three screens and a cloud.’ The
three screens refer to TV, computer and
mobile phone, while the ‘cloud’ is said
to tie them all together. “Cloud is here
to stay. Around 70-80 percent of our
developers across Microsoft are working
on cloud-related services,” says Moorthy
Uppaluri, GM, Developer and Platform
Evangelism, Microsoft India.
India is a very important destination
for Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy.
About 8,000 applications have been
built on Windows Azure (Microsoft’s
cloud computing platform) in India.
“ISVs and SIs including Wipro, Infosys,
TCS, HCL Technologies and several
others are building applications and
solutions on Azure across verticals,
ranging from healthcare to banking to
manufacturing for both local and global
markets. Mahindra Satyam established
a Windows Azure Center of Excellence
(CoE) in Hyderabad to develop vertical
solutions,” says Uppaluri. Academic
institutions such as the IITs are also
building large India-relevant projects
leveraging Microsoft’s Azure platform.
NIIT will train over 100,000 students
on Windows Azure over the next three
years. Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, is building a large-scale
application on Windows Azure to study
the basic resource allocation constraints
and strategies required for addressing
enterprise needs on the cloud.
SAP, global leader in business
management software, is also seeing
considerable traction on the cloud
front. SAP’s Business ByDesign, a
fully integrated business management
solution available over the cloud,
delivers SAP software on-demand for
smaller companies, typically with 100-
500 employees, providing the benefits
“Currently we have over 2,000 users from
300 plus client organizations for our ERP
on the cloud. We are expecting our total
customer base to reach 285 plus by end
of this fiscal”
Sukumar R, General Manager-Sales, Ramco Systems
34 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
The Cloud Computing market (including SaaS/PaaS/IaaS)
in India holds a potential of more than USD 1 Billion by 2015
Cloud Computing Market in India
in Millions, FY’10 to FY’15
$ 1,200
$ 1,084
$ 1,000
$ 800
$ 600 CAGR = 58%
$ 400
$ 200
$ 110
$ 44
$0 $ 66
FY 2010
SaaS Paas/IaaS
of large-scale business management
applications without the need for a
large IT infrastructure. SAP Business
ByDesign has achieved significant
momentum with approximately 250
customers currently signed up. “SAP
works with solution resellers and
solution partners to serve a customer
base that is expected to grow to
several hundred around the May 2011
timeframe,” says Rohit Madhur, Director
- Business ByDesign, SAP India. Some
of SAP’s Business ByDesign customers
in India include Genotypic Technology,
Prognosys eServices, and Ace Data
Devices.
IBM has invested in a Partner
Cloud center in Pune in 2010. “We
have had several customer briefings
Key Drivers for the Indian
Cloud Computing Market
● CIOs will look towards cloud computing to
reduce the ever increasing IT budgets
$ 434 ● Verticals such as BFSI, education,
healthcare, retail will increasingly rely
upon cloud computing for better reach
● Governments’ continued focus on
e-governance will drive significant
adoption of cloud pan India
$ 650
● ISVs and IT services/ BPO companies in
India will look at cloud computing for
non-linear and rapid growth
FY 2015
Source: NASSCOM Strategic Review, 2009-10 &
2010-11; Zinnov Analysis
and touch points to showcase our
cloud technology and cloud offerings
from IBM. We have had good client
success in 2010 and foresee an even
better penetration across SMEs and
large enterprise-class customers in
2011 and beyond for cloud,” says Vamsi
C Mudiam, Country Leader – Cloud
Computing, IBM India/South Asia.
Some of the Big Blue customers include
Shriram Transport Finance, Paragon
Footwear, Minilec, Lupin Labs, among
others.
WHO IS ADOPTING
With Indian small and medium
enterprises (SMEs) growing at a rate
faster than 30 percent, they pose a huge
opportunity for cloud players in India.
According to the SME Chamber of India,
with over 26.1 million SMEs, this sector
is expected to contribute to around 22
percent of the country’s GDP by 2012.
According to worldwide cloud services
study by AMI Partners, SMB spending
on cloud computing is expected to reach
USD 100 billion by 2014.
SAP serves about 3,600 SME
customers, most of them on license-
www.informationweek.in
based models. “We are strongly focused
on this market in India, with almost
32-34 percent of SAP’s business coming
from SMEs with 70 percent of our new
customers being ‘below Rs 100-crore’
companies,” says Madhur.
Industry experts believe cloud
computing will be the way forward
for SME units because of its greater
flexibility in terms of usage. “Reduction
in costs and capital equipment
expenditure in terms of hardware and
software has been one of the main
drivers in the adoption of cloud services
by SMEs. A reduction on the energy
dependence in enterprises by doing
away with data centers and reliance
on a virtualized and shared dynamic
infrastructure is another reason driving
adoption,” adds Madhur.
Companies like Ramco, which
initially focused only on the SME
segment, started catering to the large
enterprises as the market and product
started maturing. “The reasons why an
SME chooses cloud ERP are for greater
control of business in a cost-effective
manner while a larger enterprise
will choose cloud ERP to avoid the
difficulties attached with constant
upgrades, maintenance, IT staff and so
on,” says Sukumar R of Ramco Systems.
“We have seen that size of an enterprise
is not a limiting factor. If they feel
there is a need for a flexible and agile
solution, they will move to a solution
which offers it. Turnover is actually
not a dimension; it’s the need of the
application which is making companies
go for Ramco OnDemand ERP.”
ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL
The next question is which model of
cloud has seen more adoption. Is it
“We are strongly focused on this market
in India, with almost 32-34 percent of
SAP’s business coming from SMEs with
70 percent of our new customers being
‘below Rs 100-crore’ companies”
Rohit Madhur, Director - Business ByDesign, SAP India
public cloud or private cloud or is it a
mix of both? “Cloud is not a ‘one-size-
fits-all’ proposition,” says Prem Nithin,
Principal Consultant, Cisco India and
SAARC. “The right approach depends on
the organization’s needs and priorities.
Different service and deployment
models can be adopted to match the
requirements of applications across the
business.”
“Enterprises may use public clouds for burst or
peak capacity and for selected services. However,
these organizations often require a higher degree
of control over their data, applications, and systems
than current public clouds allow ”
While enterprises may witness
tangible benefits in using public clouds,
Cisco expects private and hybrid
cloud models to be more common.
“Enterprises may use public clouds for
burst or peak capacity and for selected
services. However, these organizations
often require a higher degree of control
over their data, applications, and
systems than current public clouds
allow. At scale, a private cloud offers the
efficiency and agility of a public cloud
without the loss of control,” says Nithin.
According to a report by the SME
Chamber of India, most of the SMEs
are expected to go in for public cloud
initially due to concerns about the initial
investment required in this technology.
“SMEs are looking for delivered services
or public cloud services, whereas large
enterprises are looking more at a secure
and customized private cloud service,”
says Mudiam of IBM.
The type of cloud depends on
the type of organization. “The SMEs
embrace public cloud while the
large enterprises have taken the
journey to private cloud, taking the
virtualization route. The public cloud
is about buying the infrastructure
or software as a service from the
service providers. Private cloud is
applying the cloud principles that is
detaching the applications from the
underlying infrastructure and running
them on a virtual OS/cloud OS within
the enterprise data center,” says
Sarv Saravanan, Vice President and
Managing Director, EMC India CoE.
EMC, one of the world’s largest data
storage companies, began its journey
to the private cloud as early as 2004 to
address its IT challenges like unrelenting
growth of applications, servers, and
storage arrays in the data center. The
deployment of this journey was done in
three phases: IT production, business
production and IT-as-a-service. EMC
claims the adoptin of private cloud has
resulted in a saving of USD 104.5 million
including an estimated USD 88.3 million
in capital equipment cost avoidance
and USD 16.2 million of operating cost
reduction due to increased data center
power, cooling and space efficiency.
For large enterprises, the decision
to go in for cloud computing is a big one
as concerns like data control, security
and management are issues that need
to be addressed. “Hence, the private
cloud or the hybrid model will see high
adoption by large enterprises going
forward,” says Anand Naik, Director,
Systems Engineering, Symantec. “The
hybrid cloud archiving model will also
be adopted to enable organizations to
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 35
cover story

use hosted messaging services while
keeping their archives on-premise to
drive cost out of the discovery process,
maintain strict access to data, and
define who is searching it and where
they are sending requests.”
CLOUD BRAKES
While cloud computing is known to
provide significant cost savings and
efficiencies to companies, security is
one of the prime concerns holding back
full-scale adoption of cloud. According
to the 2010 Symantec Disaster Recovery
survey India findings, 41 percent of the
respondents indicated that security
was their biggest concern while putting
applications on the cloud. The Symantec
Enterprise Security Survey 2010 –
Millennial Mobile Workforce and Data
Loss, reveals that nearly one in four
Indian enterprises feel cloud computing
increases the risk of losing data, and
27 percent feel it makes it harder to
prevent/react to data loss.
A concern with enterprises
considering cloud computing is the
fear of data being transmitted and
stored by the cloud service provider,
keeping it safe, preventing it from
being lost or stolen. The security
practices of the service provider are
another challenge facing potential
cloud adopters. “Secure access when
connecting to cloud services—such as
authentication/authorization, endpoint
security validation and security in the
data center need to be in place before
enterprises zero in on a cloud vendor,”
says Naik of Symantec.
However, with high levels of security
being offered by most cloud vendors
today, CIOs are increasingly becoming
more receptive to cloud adoption.
Adoption of cloud by data-sensitive
verticals like BFSI is an indication of
this change in mindset. According to
a ‘Cloud Survey Report’ by VMware in
association with Springboard Research,
after the IT/ITeS sector (the obvious
adopters of any profitable technology),
the second largest sector interested in
cloud adoption is BFSI. Other verticals
that are seeing high cloud adoption
in India include manufacturing,
telecom, government, education, retail,
healthcare, and transportation, the
report said.
“More education on the benefits of
cloud, government regulations, cloud
standards, and interoperability between
cloud vendors are some of the factors
that would drive mass adoption of
cloud,” says Mudiam of IBM.
THE SILVER LINING
Cloud is a disruptive technology just
like the Internet. If not in and of itself, it
is surely a disruptive IT delivery model
that has the potential to transform the
way IT services (software, infrastructure
and platform) are delivered. In the
months to come, cloud computing will
see a steep growth.
“Our conversations with customers
have long moved from ‘what/why’ of a
cloud to ‘how/when’,” says Mudiam of IBM.
Given the huge base of SMEs, India
is well positioned and on track to gain a
majority share of the global cloud pie.
Cloud computing today is a reality in
India and the number of customers is
growing by the day. The weather surely
looks cloudy and clouds are finally
soaring high on the Indian skies! n
Ayushman Baruah (ayushman.baruah@ubm.com)

Cloud Computing: Some observations by Analyst firms

Zinnov
Zinnov Management Consulting, a management consulting firm, has forecast cloud computing market in India to reach about USD 1,084
million by 2015, in a study on the Indian Cloud Computing market, titled ‘Cloud Computing in India: Opportunities & Way Forward’.
The report also highlighted that in the cloud computing market in India, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has witnessed the most rapid
uptake until now. As components of the overall cloud market, SaaS in India is likely to reach a mark of USD 650 million by 2015, while
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) markets cumulatively would touch USD 434 million each by then.
Divulging details on the SaaS market, the report said that the domestic market for SaaS is estimated to be about USD 66 million and
is currently dominated by Collaborative Applications, CRM, ERP and E-mail workloads.
In addition to the global providers of PaaS, Indian companies have also sprung up offering cloud based Platform-as-a-Service.
Several Indian companies are beginning to offer IaaS to leverage the untapped market potential, highlighted the report.
Discussing the growth verticals for the adoption of cloud in India, Zinnov’s report highlights that telecom, IT-BPO and retail
have the highest spending on IT as a percentage of revenues; verticals like telecom and BFSI are highly mature with their IT adoption
and show higher potential towards cloud adoption going forward. In an effort to meet global standards, verticals such as education,
healthcare, and government show massive potential for cloud adoption in the immediate future.

IDC India
According to market intelligence and advisory firm IDC’s India Cloud Computing Market: Current State and Future Roadmap Study
2010, the Indian Public Cloud Computing market was estimated to be USD 66.7 million in 2009 and projected to grow at a compounded
annual growth rate of 40 percent over the next five years to 2014.

36 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
cover story

The cloud as a springboard

A rising number of Indian companies are using the immense power of the cloud to
transform their business models. Here is a look at some of the innovative ones

By Srikanth RP

Nustreet Technologies: The business owner needs help to put in processes and systems
Finding fortune at the so that he can scale effectively. The most optimal way to do this
Bottom of the Pyramid is to leverage IT,” informs Parthasarathy.
Nustreet Technologies calls itself a This is a niche segment, that has not been effectively
‘Cloudware Applications Company’, with a focus
tapped by existing vendors. When compared on a price-feature-
on providing simple business applications for
value scale, most of the existing solutions fail to meet primary
SMBs. Unlike the majority of the SaaS players,
business needs due to the inherent complexity and usage of
who have targeted a broad market such as HR or Healthcare – rolling out enterprise software products. Parthasarathy says
Nustreet specializes in building highly targeted micro vertical
that the price point, expensive support programs, and even
applications. For example, instead of a broad category such as
more formidable upgrade programs make it a nonstarter for
discreet manufacturing, it has built a specialized application for
the small business owner.
companies in the forging business. Nustreet wants to straddle this vaccum with its portfolio of
“The needs of companies in the forging industry micro verticalized applications.
are distinct from the needs of companies in the foundry “An SME business owner, today, is highly pressed for time,
manufacturing business or the sheet metal business. Each constantly on the move and often single-handedly managing
business follows a unique process, and needs a different all aspects of his growing business. He needs information on
approach,” explains S Parthasarathy, Chief technology officer,
his fingertips on how his business is performing, on a set of
Nustreet Technologies, on the need for a micro vertical key parameters very specific to his business. For instance,
approach. a spinning mill owner wants to know his yarn realization
Nustreet Technologies currently has six applications in numbers, a hospital administrator wants to know his revenue-
the market - NuCare for small & medium hospitals, NuLabs forper-patient-bed, while a forging company owner may want to
Stand-alone diagnostic labs, NuSpin for Yarn Spinning Mills,track his on-time delivery. We want to address this need of SME
NuForge for forging companies, NuWorks for Engineering owners through our portfolio of highly targeted, micro vertical
workshops, and NuSheets for Metal Fabrication companies. Theapplications,” explains Parthasarathy. The success of this
company is in the process of building and rolling out an array of
approach can be seen from the fact that the firm already has
several such applications across other industry clusters. 50 customers, that use its cloud-based solutions.
The firm’s objective is simple — address the unique needs of NuStreet applications are offered in partnership with
entrepreneurs or SMBs with unique solutions. Microsoft on the Windows Azure cloud. This is offered in a
“The bottom-of-the-pyramid in the case of business subscription business model, so that customers can use the
consumers are the SMEs — companies
with less than 250 employees today. “The cloud is to SMBs today what
These companies dominate the business the cellphone was to most of us a
landscape, particularly those of emerging
economies like India. This segment has
decade back. The cloud gives SMBs the
the highest growth potential as these oprtunity to leapfrog technologies”
economies scale. Many of them have the
aspiration, expertise, and today, the right
market condition to move to the next level.
However they need a leg up to get there. S Parthasarathy, CTO, Nustreet Technologies

38 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
application immediately, with very minimal upfront investments challenges that any new idea encounters.
in hardware or software licenses. For delivering relevant cloud With this in mind, and the fact that the firm had to
services, the firm has built each application collaboratively with provision for SaaS based services, Mediology wanted to ensure
experts from specific microvertical clusters. that they could provide economies of scale and flexibility
Today, the cloud has improved Nustreet’s ability to reach when the idea gained traction, without investing large capital
out to more customers at an accelerated pace. In addition, as expenditure in the computing hardware. Using AWS provided
the whole model is now on OPEX than CAPEX, it has improved the firm unparalleled scalability and flexibility, which in turn
the firm’s ability to preserve cash — a vital requirement for helped in overcoming infrastructure challenges.
a new company. This in turn, has given the firm a greater Manish Dhingra, Director, Mediology, explains the
capability in rolling out new products. advantage of unparalleled scalability with the help of an
When asked what the cloud is for SMBs, Parthasarathy example. “As part of our core digitization stack, we need to
echoes a thought, which may become an oft repeated quote enable our customers to process their Pre-Press PDF files in a
whenever the topic of cloud computing for SMBs comes up for quick turnaround time. Hence the ability to scale our instances
discussion. Says Parthasarathy, “The cloud is to SMBs today, to match those response levels was a key business challenge.
what the cellphone was to most of us a decade back.” Due to the elasticity of AWS cloud platform, we have been
Parthasarathy says that in the earlier days, getting a able to effectively address this time critical requirement of our
phone connection in India was so cumbersome that most of us customers.”
ended up not using phones. He believes that small businesses Without AWS, the firm would have to purchase hardware
face a similar situation today, and most of them are left out of and spend time in setting up its own servers in a data centre or
the IT revolution. Today, not using a cellphone is considered rent server space on a yearly basis from IT vendors.
unthinkable. Can the same revolution happen in the adoption “Traditional options would have been sub-optimal to our
of IT by small businesses due to the cloud? Nustreet believes requirements as it would mean locking us in a long-term data
that the transformation will happen, and therein lies a massive centre contract that would have cost at least USD 20,000 of
business opportunity. capital expense to provision servers and take care of redundant
storage even before launching our business. For a data centre
rental of 42U space with 3 KVA redundant power, cooling
Mediology Software: and bandwidth would have cost us USD 2,500 per month. In
Publishing on the cloud addition, the time lag associated with the procurements and
The Internet has revolutionized the dependency on a fixed infrastructure would have made it highly
publishing business. Today, established improbable to scale our business as we grew,” explains Dhingra.
newspapers compete with bloggers, tweeters The firm estimates that the traditional way would have cost
and small publishers for mindshare. With the the firm USD 30,000 per annum. It also estimates that the time
Internet becoming a significant contributor spent to set up and maintain those servers would be around 24
to current revenues and future growth plans, established man-months, which is equivalent to another expense of USD
media firms need a quick way to leverage technology to their 20,000.
advantage. “AWS helps us to avoid incurring CAPEX in the old model of
Identifying this trend in the publishing industry early, IT, and turn that into OPEX using the cloud. The total estimated
Mediology Software introduced an innovative way of creating cost avoidance by starting our business immediately with
a virtual world for publishing houses to reach out to their AWS cloud platform is about USD 70,000 per annum. More
audiences. The firm has a SaaS solution on Amazon Web importantly, it gives us the business agility to scale as we grow.
Services (AWS) cloud that enables print publishers to digitize It also helps in channelizing precious funds, human resources
their print content, add social media interactivity and distribute and time to develop our core business,” explains Dhingra on
the content via web and mobile devices. Overall, this helps why the cloud model is perfect for a startup like Mediology.
media companies to increase content circulation, aid better For its innovative business model, Mediology was
tracking, improve monetization, and
achieve greater demographic classification “The total estimated cost avoidance by
of their reader base. starting our business immediately with
For a startup firm, leveraging the
cloud makes perfect sense. The nature
the cloud platform is about USD 70,000
of the media business is built on the sole per annum. More importantly, it gives us
premise of “Economies of Scale.” Hence the business agility to scale as we grow”
during the initial period which was more
of a transitory and that of accepting the
changing paradigms, the firm had to face Manish Dhingra, Director, Mediology

march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 39
cover story
recognized as one of the seven finalists and the only one from
the APAC region at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-Up
Challenge, a global competition that encourages start-up
companies to leverage the AWS cloud platform.
ACME Tele Power:
Energy Management as a
service
Even as energy consumption continues to
rise at an alarming rate, there has been
no standardized approach to cut down energy
consumption at a global level. Apart from
innovative companies such as Infosys and Wipro,
there have been extremely few examples of companies who
have managed to cut down their energy consumption levels
on a sustained basis.
Can IT manage and monitor energy consumption patterns
of companies the same way as IT infrastructure is managed
today? In other words, can energy management be offered as
a service?
An innovative Indian company, ACME Tele Power is doing
just that, by creating a ‘Global Energy Management Center’.
Similar to the way IT infrastructure is managed today, the firm
wants to replicate this model to the management of energy at
a global level.
40 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
“The Global Energy Management Center (GEMC) can
help companies monitor energy consumption patterns from
multiple sources. These patterns can be further analyzed for
usage, cost, and carbon footprint in a number of ways that
help in optimizing energy. The center is uniquely positioned
to service the clients across the globe by deploying a Remote
Control Unit that has the capabilities to communicate to a
cloud-based architecture. The entire application is developed
on Microsoft Application Framework by using Google API’s,”
explains Satyadev Adurti, VP-IT for ACME Telepower, who is
also responsible for the Global Energy Monitoring Center.
Similar to a remote NOC, the Global Energy Management
center has the ability to monitor energy demand and supply.
Using an internal proprietary framework of ACME, the firm
identifies gaps in production of energy, and tries to optimize
various points in the energy production cycle.
The energy analysis team does a dipstick study remotely
to identify various circuits’ consumption patterns. The
consumption patterns are then analyzed with the kind of
equipment connected to the entire chain and the equipment
efficiency ratings. The efficiency ratings are further analyzed
to see any leakage in the entire circuit. ACME then uses an
optimizer tool to generate the gaps.
“Upon identifying the gaps, we propose optimization work
at various levels. This entire activity is performed month-on-
month to ensure continuous improvements in both production
www.informationweek.in
 “The Global Energy Management
Center can help companies monitor
energy consumption patterns from
multiple sources”
Satyadev Adurti, VP-IT, ACME Telepower
cycles and utilization cycles,” explains Adurti.
To analyze energy supply and demand, the system looks
at downstream inputs like fuel consumption, solar radiation,
wind patterns and weather inputs to optimize production
cycles.
What is significant about this model is that the equipment by AWS. Time to be market-wise, we are able to deploy our
directly communicates with a cloud-based infrastructure.
This is used by the firm to monitor energy production and
consumption patterns on a real-time basis. The center
has deployed a LED video wall that can display real time
monitoring of sites across the globe.
When you consider the volume of data flowing in from
different parts of the globe, the cloud-based infrastructure
seems like a perfect fit. The cloud model has also cut down
the time and cost of deployment. For instance, compared to a
traditional form of deployment, the cloud-based solution has
cut down its deployment time by a massive 60 percent.
If one looks at the landscape, every possible enterprise
can be a customer of ACME Telepower. As the firm already
has a proven track record in telecom, it has started off with
monitoring energy needs of cell towers.
ACME Telepower is running a pilot for Aircel for 450 sites, prove scalable deployments which otherwise were a function
wherein it will manage and optimize energy requirements.
Looking at the scale of opportunities, the firm is initially
targeting enterprises in the telecom, real estate and utility
space. In the future, it is targeting enterprises in the retail,
logistics and banking domain.
The idea of remotely monitoring global energy
management patterns is an extremely exciting value
proposition for enterprises that are struggling to meet their
energy consumption needs cost effectively. With a cloud-
based solution, ACME Telepower has the potential to bring
about a similar revolution that was brought in by players in
the remote IT infrastructure management space.
Dialify Technologies:
Audio Gaming via the cloud
Focused on the niche but fast growing
field of audio games, Dialify builds
applications and social games on AWS cloud,
with dynamic audio interfaces for easy delivery that there is a huge opportunity in addressing the unique
over telecommunication networks in India.
As audio games have the potential
of becoming a high value and high
volume industry, the cloud is the perfect
delivery model.
The ability of the cloud in scaling
up quickly with minimum effort can
be seen from Dialify’s example. Today,
even though Dialify is just a 3-person
company, it has been able to deploy and
maintain platforms across multiple large
service providers without a huge effort.
“In terms of cost effectiveness, we have been able to
roll our products to multiple carrier networks without any
CAPEX. More importantly, we have been able to sustain
operations over the past two quarters, without having to
expand our team, due to the online management offered
applications to new markets within a week in most cases,
whereas in a more traditional physical infrastructure rollout
this would have been in months,” says Nikhil Soman, Founder,
Dialify Technologies.
Without the cloud, a firm like Dialify would be restrained
by the limitations imposed due to budgetary constraints or in
buying new infrastructure. Today, the cloud has given the firm
new wings to fly and expand in new markets.
“Telecom application margins are extremely low. By
standardizing on Amazon Web Services, we have been able
to provide a unique service to carriers and consumers at
extremely low costs, leading to higher adoption numbers. Our
applications are the first movers in the segment and building
awareness and driving sampling remains our highest priority.
AWS based-infrastructure has helped us demonstrate and
of significant investments,” informs Soman on the viability of
a cloud-based model for startups.
8KMiles:
Virtual outsourcing
ecosystem
8KMiles is perhaps the perfect example
of the power of collaboration that a cloud-
based model can achieve. The firm has
pioneered a unique outsourcing model by
leveraging the cloud. Aptly called ‘cloudsourcing’, the model
allows firms to get on-demand access to dependable remote
talent and infrastructure.
While large organizations have the luxury of inviting
hundreds of IT companies for bidding for IT-based projects,
small companies do not have the required knowledge or
choice. Due to their small budgets, most of these companies
are not on the radar of large companies. The firm believes
needs of SMBs, by using the cloud.
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 41
cover story

“The cloud has helped in leveling the explaining on how the cloud has helped
playing field for companies such as ours his company scale rapidly.
to build businesses and compete in the The success of a company like
8KMiles is also a case in point to
global marketplace” understand how the Internet can help
even small companies compete against
the big players.
“The AWS cloud has helped in
Harish Ganesan, Co- founder and CTO, 8KMiles leveling the playing field for companies
such as ours to build businesses and
“We provide a distributed development platform that compete in the global marketplace.
blends a global talent marketplace with collaboration tools We are now able to offer to businesses across the world our
and cloud infrastructure. This allows businesses to hire innovative end-to-end Virtual Sourcing Model solution on
technology talent on-demand, and have them work on the cloud. Any business can come to 8KMiles.com to hire
cloud-based infrastructure using our pre-configured remote the technology talent anytime they need, and access cloud-
desktops and servers for development and testing,” explains based infrastructure for their development or testing needs
Harish Ganesan, Co- founder and Chief Technology Officer, almost instantly. Once their applications are ready, 8KMiles
8KMiles. can help them seamlessly deploy their applications and go
The 8KMiles platform provides SMBs access to verified live on the AWS cloud. All of this captures the essence of the
quality talent, in addition to pre-built infrastructure delivered cloud – that is being on-demand, pay-as-you-use, infinitely
using the cloud. SMBs, can for example, build their own scalable and more crucially, allowing you to focus on core
testing and development teams and collaborate with them. competencies and innovate quickly,” explains Ganeshan on
For example, a concept called Projectspace helps remote how the cloud can truly transform business models.
providers work as if they were in the same office with video
conferencing, document sharing and status tracking tools.
The firm has been one of the early adopters of AWS, QID Technologies:
and has achieved a lot of flexibility by moving its RFID as a Service
application to AWS. A year back, when we asked a CIO of a
8KMiles’s Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) also leading retail firm, his thoughts on using
uses AWS extensively to deliver remote desktops and test/ RFID, he had just one simple answer – while
development environments for globally distributed teams. the cost of the RFID tag has been reducing
“Our core offering, 8KMiles’ VCE provides pre-configured year-on-year, the overall cost from an Indian
remote desktops and servers on demand. We wanted the context was still prohibitive, and did not offer a business
whole desktop/server delivery to be automated, just in time case for mass deployment.
with almost zero upfront infrastructure investment, with the As one can see, RFID is the perfect example of a brilliant
ability to support a wide range of customizable technology technology, which has not yet found the level of success due
stacks,” explains Ganesan. to its prohibitive cost of deployment. To tackle the high cost
The firm moved its entire web application to AWS in of deploying RFID, an Indian firm, QuantumID Technologies
early 2008 and realized a direct 40 percent reduction in its (QID), has come up with an interesting innovation. The firm
monthly recurring costs. The usage of AWS infrastructure offers ‘RFID-as-a-service’ wherein it offers a complete RFID
cloud platform combined with automation has substantially solution – the hardware, software, and the implementation
reduced the load on its IT infrastructure team, enabling it to on a pay-per-transaction model.
focus its time on the core business. “Instead of spending on CAPEX, retail firms can use
“By using AWS, we were able to try
out proof-of-concepts and experiment
our ideas very quickly and easily, and “Due to the cloud, we can scale up by
pay only for what we use. We were more than 30-40 times without worrying
also able to bring in scalability and about the cost of infrastructure.We
elasticity at the early stages of our
web application design by utilizing
are also able to bring down the cost of
the on-demand pricing model of AWS, deploying RFID”
accelerating our speed-to-market that
helped us achieve our business success
much more quickly,” says Ganeshan Prasanna Gogwekar, COO, QID Technologies

42 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
our model to deploy RFID. The pay- “After moving to Amazon Web Services,
per-transaction model ensures that it our traffic has increased more than
becomes a part of their revenue,” opines three fold.We are now able to launch
Prasanna Gogwekar, COO, QID.
To ensure scalability, QID has
multiple products for bus operators on
enabled its data storage layer associated a SaaS model ”
with its RFID ACT system (Automated
Cargo tracking) on the Microsoft Azure
Platform. The cloud platform is ideal Charan Padmaraju, Co-founder and CTO, redBus
for a closed loop supply chain process.
In these scenarios, data storage requirements can be huge our servers and it took two days. On another occasion,
when you consider that hundreds or maybe thousands of the memory size wasn’t enough to service the work load,
RFID tags are read multiple times at different points in the the process to upgrade took more than a month and our
supply chain. business took a hit,” states Charan Padmaraju, Co-founder
The cloud model gives QID the ability to scale up storage and CTO, redBus.
needs as business volumes grow. “The cloud is central to To address the constraints of infrastructure, the firm
our business. From a scale point of view, we can scale up by decided to move its entire infrastructure to AWS. Post
more than 30-40 times without worrying about the cost of deployment, the firm can build any application it wants
infrastructure. Due to the cloud, we are able to bring down using any platform or any programming model or operating
the cost of providing RFID services, and make it a viable system. It has the ability to control the resources, fit them
proposition to the Indian market,” exclaims Gogwekar. into applications as it sees fit and pay per use.
The cloud also gives it the ability to customize the “After moving to AWS, our traffic has increased more
solution according to different industry verticals. For than three-fold. We are now able to launch multiple products
example, in certain industries such as textiles, transactions for bus operators on a SaaS model. This is possible only in a
can be priced per meter, while in other industries cloud platform due to its elasticity and scalability. We have
transactions can be priced per kilogram. also been able to fully tap our analytics requirement with
The RFID-as-a-service model has already been deployed AWS. AWS gives us an overall cost benefit of about 30 to 40
for Kingfisher Cargo, where the solution has been tested out percent,” explains Padmaraju.
for scale for handling thousands of pieces of cargo. Initially, the firm used AWS to build one of its new SaaS
offerings that it delivered to customers. As the experience
was good, the firm decided to move its entire infrastructure
redBus: to AWS. The firm is completely on AWS today, and runs even
Cloud accelerates business its financial management applications on AWS.
delivery
redBus is an Indian travel agency that
specializes in bus travel throughout India by Prime Focus Technologies:
selling bus tickets throughout the country. Cloud based-media process
Tickets are purchased through the outsourcing
company’s Website or through the Web services As new media delivery platforms such
of its agents and partners. The company also offers software as mobile and web emerge, publishers of
on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis, which gives bus content face a huge challenge in customizing
operators the option of handling their own ticketing and and delivering the content to multiple platforms.
managing their own inventories. Till date, redBus has To address this challenge, an Indian firm, Prime Focus
sold over 2 million bus tickets and has
more than 100 bus operators, using the
software to manage their operations. “The cloud model has allowed us to
Operating in a high volume market, successfully establish a media supply
the firm was not able to service its chain for the industry, linking all partners
customers quickly as it had fixed number
of servers with limited capability.
in the advertising eco-system through
“Procuring a new server or our platform”
upgrading an existing server took more
than two weeks. For example, once
we wanted to open a port on one of R Sankaranarayanan, CEO, Prime Focus Technologies

march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 43
cover story
Technologies, has created a cloud-based solution called CLEAR.
Prime Focus Technologies has also timed the opportunity
right, as the cloud-based solution is apt for firms that do not
want to invest heavily in new technology platforms. The firm
saw that the companies in the Media & Entertainment sector
were facing two major challenges: One, transition from tape
to file formats, and two, an increasing number of platforms
and the content demands of each of these platforms. Both
these challenges meant substantial investment in new
technologies. The firm decided that this was the right time
to launch its product.
The cloud-based platform gives the firm the opportunity
to offer a hosted service, at a fraction of the total cost.
“Clients were apprehensive of making the investment
upfront as the returns based on content demand were
not guaranteed. A hosted model lets us offer the client a
‘pay-as-you-use’ model, wherein the client’s spending on
the platform increases with an increase in requirements,”
informs Ramki Sankaranarayanan, Founder, President and
CEO, Prime Focus Technologies.
The firm claims that this is the world’s first hybrid multi-
platform content operations solution. The solution allows
firms to produce, process, manage and deliver content for
revenue-generating multi-platform opportunities.
Besides lowering costs and improving agility, the
cloud is also a perfect platform for enabling collaboration.
“By setting up a cloud-based model, we have successfully
established a media supply chain for the industry,
linking all partners in the advertising eco-system (brand,
creative agency, media agency, and broadcasters) through
our platform. The platform allows these partners to easily
exchange information and files,” explains Sankaranarayanan.
The cloud also gives the firm the ability to customize
its offering as per the needs of the clients in terms of
configuration, workflows and deployment models. “By using the
cloud model, we have been able to make the concept of Media
Process Outsourcing a reality,” concurs Sankaranarayanan,
emphasizing on how the cloud has allowed it to offer its clients
a bouquet of media processing services which can be managed
and delivered through a central platform.
The success of the firm can be seen from the fact
that it is already providing this service to 12 broadcasters,
which account for 101 channels. The clients come from
different verticals in the Media and
Entertainment industry such as
production houses, advertisers, media “As we were not sure of how much traffic
planning and design agencies. The list we would be getting, it was easy for us to
of clients that are using the cloud- start with an initial setup on Amazon Web
based model include big names such
as Sony, STAR TV, BCCI, Hindustan
Services with a rough estimation”
Unilever, Saatchi & Saatchi, Group M,
Schawk, British Movietone Library,
Balaji Telefilms and Global Cricket
Ventures. Kawaljit Singh Bedi, CTO, NDTV Convergence
44 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
NDTV:
Cloud aids convergence
NDTV (New Delhi Television) is one of
India’s largest media houses with nine
television channels reaching an audience of
one billion people across India, the Middle East
and South East Asia.
In 2009, the firm launched Tubaah – its foray into online
video. The website is positioned to be a rich repository of
premium video content from NDTV’s five national TV channels
(NDTV 24X7, NDTV India, NDTV Profit, NDTV Good Times and
NDTV Hindu).
Considering that the website was positioned to be a
platform for videos, the biggest problem that the firm faced
when planning for infrastructure was estimating how the
traffic would grow.
“We required a robust platform which could scale easily
to meet the demands of a highly volatile ‘news’ website,”
points out Kawaljit Singh Bedi, CTO, NDTV Convergence (the
business unit that controls all NDTV websites). The impact of
storage that videos can create on the IT infrastructure can
be seen from the fact that since its launch, the website has
grown rapidly. Today, over 100,000 video clips are available on
Tubaah.
Bedi concluded that since ‘news’ was a moving target, it
made perfect sense to go in for a cloud-based platform. “As
we were not sure of how much traffic we would be getting,
it was easy for us to start with an initial setup on Amazon
Web Services with a rough estimation. We then scaled our
requirement till we understood the perfect configuration for
the real traffic,” explains Bedi. Besides the flexibility, the firm
estimates that it has managed a minimum cost savings of
close to 30 percent after using AWS.
The firm’s Video Content Management Systems (VCMS) is
hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which powers Tubaah
and all NDTV video properties. It also powers video APIs
which are being used in its mobile applications and third party
tie ups.
After the success of Tubaah, the firm has launched
additional properties on the Amazon Web Services (AWS)
cloud platform. Major ones include – NDTV Profit (NDTV’s
business & finance portal), NDTV Social (NDTV’s social
platform) and NDTV FilmClub (An entertainment based site).
www.informationweek.in
case study
Private cloud helps L&T Infotech
slash infrastructure costs
Post deployment, the firm has witnessed significant reduction in costs related to
infrastructure support
By Srikanth RP
As one of the fastest growing IT
services companies, L&T Infotech,
regularly undertook software testing and
development projects from clients. As
each client required a dedicated hosting
infrastructure for itself, it led to under
utilization of project-specific computing
infrastructure.
As the number of projects started
increasing, L&T Infotech found itself
staring at one big challenge — on
one hand, the need for servers were
increasing everyday, while on the other
hand, the average server utilization was
as low as 20 percent. The Infrastructure
Management Services (IMS) and IT
Infrastructure division of L&T Infotech
recognized this as a classic server sprawl
and decided to build a private cloud
christened CloudX.
First steps
L&T Infotech started the journey towards
the private cloud by taking steps to
consolidate and virtualize the servers. For
the first phase, the firm decided to have
only development and testing servers on
the cloud. Production servers were only
virtualized and were not part of the first
phase. As L&T Infotech had a good blend
of different hypervisors for different
class of computing needs such as open
source based hypervisors (Xen & KVM)
for development, testing and POC servers
and commercial hypervisors (VMWare
and HyperV) for production servers,
the firm felt a need to have a private
cloud solution that would be agnostic to
underlying virtualization.
Since data centers were spread
46 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
L&T infotech
“The private cloud has helped in
slashing the average provisioning time
from 5 days to less than 20 minutes”
Abhay Chitnis, Vice President and Head of
Technology, L&T Infotech
across various locations, the firm wanted
to have a private cloud solution that was
geographically aware.
“To save WAN bandwidth, a need
was felt to have images provisioned
locally. Hence we built a Geo-smart or
location-aware cloud, so that users could
provision images from the location they
have requested it from,” explains Abhay
Chitnis, vice president and head of
technology, L&T Infotech.
How the private cloud has
delivered
Post deployment, the private cloud has
transformed the heterogeneous physical
infrastructure into an infrastructure
which is optimized for performance and
cost. Business units have the ability to
administer fixed amount of computing
units, in addition to the capability to
monitor the usage of provisioned units
and use of licenses. The private cloud also
has a metering and chargeback model
in place. Users are charged based on the
type of server, time-based usage of server
and the software licenses used.
Built in governance policies for IT
licenses, protection policies, role-based
approver’s delegation and integration
with active directory ensure that the IT
infrastructure can be focused on meeting
service levels by taking a more strategic
approach. The private cloud also has a
self-service cloud management portal
showcasing a catalog of services.
Post deployment, the firm has
witnessed significant reduction in costs
related to infrastructure support. L&T
Infotech has also streamlined resource
management and improved its capacity
planning due to better understanding of
usage. Process automation has helped in
reducing operating expenses.
“The private cloud has helped in
slashing the average provisioning time
from 5 days to less than 20 minutes. More
significantly, our average infrastructure
capacity has increased by 75 percent,”
emphasizes Chitnis.
While the private cloud deployment
has been a limited rollout across L&T
Infotech’s locations for specific business
units, the firm plans to extend this to
other locations in the next few months.
For an IT firm like L&T Infotech, the
deployment has also helped in positioning
the firm as a thought leader in the
emerging world of private clouds. n
Srikanth RP (srikanth.rp@ubm.com)
www.informationweek.in
case study
Pennar simplifies processes with
MS CRM online cloud service
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has helped Pennar Industries manage their information
better and consequently get them closer to their customers
By Ayushman Baruah
Pennar Industries, which began by
manufacturing Cold Rolled Steel Strips
(CRSS) has grown and diversified to
become a leading engineering company
making a host of steel-based products.
Pennar is now a multi-location, multi-
product company with more than 300
customers and 1,200 employees. It also
has a subsidiary, Pennar Engineered
Building Systems (PEBS), which designs,
manufactures and erects pre-engineered
steel buildings.
Until last year, the company used MS
Excel to record the sales and marketing
activities including important forms
like the Project Information form (PIF)
and Job acceptance form (JAF). The
company’s fast-paced growth demanded
an automated process to eliminate issues
like inaccuracy of information being
logged in the PIFs/JAFs, and redundancy
of information. Too many Excel sheets
were getting cumbersome to maintain, as
reports had to be generated/updated on
a daily, weekly, quarterly, or annual basis
depending on the requirements.
With the manufacturing industry
evolving from being product-centric to
more customer-centric, Pennar required a
solution that would help them get closer
to their customers. “There was a need for
a cloud-based distributed solution that
was both location-independent and would
offer our sales team flexibility in order
entry, customer follow-up and project
management interaction,” says Aditya
Rao, Director - New Projects at Pennar
Industries.
pennar industries
“MS CRM’s ability to export reports to
other formats such as pdf was a plus
point. It is easy for a sales executive to
learn the process and use it regularly”
Aditya Rao, Director - New Projects, Pennar
Industries
SIMPLIFYING THE PROCESSES
In January this year, Pennar implemented
the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online,
the cloud version of the new Microsoft
Dynamics CRM 2011, for their sales and
marketing department. The objective
of the implementation was to simplify
the process of enquiry generation and
documentation, tracking of enquiry
status, and also to maintain databases.
Apart from maintaining databases, the
MS Dynamics CRM Online is also used
for generating various types of analysis
in terms of lost quote analysis, market
segment analysis, calculating the ROI
from exhibitions and seminars, keeping
a track of budgets and expenses, and
for checking their India performance as
against sales office-wise performance.
“A scope had to be defined for the
implementation, that was both thorough
and could be accomplished in the limited
period of time, that the company had set
for implementation. Defining the scope
was a challenge. Our implementation
partner Intelligroup’s assistance was vital
in helping us overcome this challenge,”
says Rao.
Pennar chose Microsoft Dynamics
CRM Online over Salesforce.com as it
allowed tight integration with other
Microsoft products such as Office and
Outlook. “MS CRM’s ability to export
reports to other document formats such
as PDF was another plus point. Also, PEBS
intends to begin implementation of an
ERP solution within the next couple of
months. Moreover, it is easy for a sales
executive to learn the process and use it
regularly without any hassles,” says Rao.
The company has reaped a number
of benefits post implementation of MS
Dynamics CRM online. Rao outlines some
of them:
l Integration of information has been
made easier
l Better traceability and accountability
of information has been achieved
l Automation has made it easier to
track and retrieve information at any
given point of time
l Report generation and database
maintenance is simpler and far more
effective n
Ayushman Baruah (ayushman.baruah@ubm.com)
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 47
case study
Indian greetings card company uses
cloud to manage dynamic traffic
A public cloud infrastructure has helped 123greetings.com, the world’s second largest
electronic greetings cards website, to reduce deployment costs by 40 percent
By Srikanth RP
The true essence or value of a public
cloud is in its elasticity. This value holds
special significance for a company
which is in a space that witnesses
seasonal spikes in demand. IntraSoft
Technologies discovered this value aptly
when it used the services of Amazon
Web Services, for hosting its website.
IntraSoft Technologies owns and
operates 123greetings.com, the world’s
second largest electronic greetings
card website. The scale of the growth
can be seen from the volume of the
traffic registered on the website. From
36,000 unique visitors in 1998, the
visitor volume rose to two million in
2001, and thereafter soared to 91 million
in 2009-10. With the firm adding new
features periodically, the volumes were
going up exponentially. For example, a
new platform called ‘Connect’ received
a huge user response with over 6 lakh
users registering themselves. Another
platform, ‘Studio’ too received a huge
response as over 6,000 registered
artists put up their works for display.
As is the typical case with any other
public website, IntraSoft too faced
a huge challenge in managing peak
loads where seasonal spikes made it
difficult to scale up the infrastructure
according to the demand. Scaling up
the infrastructure and deploying a
huge number of servers was also not
a practical idea as the firm would have
substantial number of servers that
would be underutilized during off-
season periods.
48 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
IntraSoft Technologies
“Due to the cloud, today we have the
ability to scale up the infrastructure
according to the volume of traffic”
Sharad Kajaria, Director, IntraSoft Technologies
Caught between the scissors of
maintaining growth while maximizing
utilization, the firm decided to use a
public cloud infrastructure provided by
Amazon Web Services.
“Our business is seasonal in nature.
For example, there is a huge difference
between heavy card sending months
like Christmas, New Year and Valentine’s
Day as opposed to the light summer
months. Hence, the flexibility provided
by a cloud-based architecture fulfills our
primary business need,” says Sharad
Kajaria, Director, IntraSoft Technologies.
Today, the cloud infrastructure gives
the firm the ability to scale quickly and
support seasonal spikes in demand.
Post deployment, the firm has
gained in terms of multiple factors such
as speed, cost, speed of deployment
and flexibility. For example, the speed
of opening of pages remains the same
even at high traffic periods, which was
not the case before. Kajaria says that
today the website opens at an average
time period of 4-5 seconds even during
high traffic.
Prior to the cloud-based
infrastructure, IntraSoft had to deploy
hundreds of stand alone servers to
handle peak traffic. Due to the cloud,
today the firm has the ability to scale
up the infrastructure according to the
volume of traffic. This flexibility has
cut down infrastructure costs by a
huge margin, and the firm estimates
that it has reduced deployment costs
by approximately 40 percent on an
annualized basis.
Apart from flexibility, the cloud
gives IntraSoft the capability to quickly
provision infrastructure according to
business needs. “When we deployed
individual servers, it would take us two
- three days to deploy them individually.
Today, with cloud-based services, we
can have a fully ready server deployed
in just two to three hours,” explains
Kajaria.
At the click of a button, the firm
can add resources to its infrastructure,
rather than having to go through a
complex requisition process. n
Srikanth RP (srikanth.rp@ubm.com)
www.informationweek.in
 opinion
Parag Arora / Cisco India
Banking on the cloud
Virtually every business sector today
is betting big on cloud computing. More
so, given the benefits it promises and
the way it changes, how technology
is delivered and consumed by the end
user in an enterprise. Like most other
sectors, banks and financial services
companies too can benefit from the fact
that cloud computing helps create a more
flexible, agile business model to meet the
growing business needs in a dynamic and
competitive landscape.
Cloud computing helps banks
transform their business processes and
enhance their ability to grow in new
sectors or regions without the time and
cost burdens involved with establishing
a physical presence. It helps create new
markets and services to differentiate
from competition and improve the ways
customers access and use the bank’s
products and services.
Private cloud benefits
The private cloud is the first step
towards cloud computing. It emerges
stronger than the public cloud because
it grants banks control over their IT
while providing reduced complexity,
increased flexibility, and all other benefits
associated with cloud computing.
Private clouds have emerged as the
hot favorite of the banking industry also
because in a financial environment, where
applications are critical and governed
by stringent user industry compliance,
they provide high security. They ensure
that no data is lost or misplaced and
provide the flexibility to modify resource
configuration according to demand.
Since private clouds are deployed within
an organization’s firewall, the threat
of security breaches is negated. The
company’s IT infrastructure can be
moved onto a single private network
50 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
using a virtual private network (VPN) with
ease and faster access.
Private clouds allow more systems
to operate at high transaction volumes
without loading the network, ensuring
better customer experience. They
promise cost savings and efficient
services by having dedicated resources
for each business unit in an enterprise.
Since resources are rented instead
of purchased, it helps convert CAPEX
to OPEX, reducing the total cost of
ownership. Private clouds come with the
advantages of affordability and safety
and enable a transition in banking. To
guarantee long-term success, banks
need to understand the technology and
develop new applications that would
benefit the customer.
When an organization changes its
infrastructure to a cloud configuration,
it should be done in real time to curb
the wastage of unused resources.
Technologies such as Cisco’s Unified
Computing Systems (UCS) help monitor
the server, storage, memory and network
capacity. They can calculate, with high
levels of accuracy, which servers require
more resources and automatically
prioritize them. A well-designed private
cloud computing platform also costs less
than a dedicated server on a per server
basis.
Challenges to cloud
Although cloud computing is not a
new concept for banks, this sector has
been slow in adopting the technology.
Such deployment models could lead to
an environment sprawl and a lack of
control in terms of change management.
This can further lead to security risks,
reliability issues and a lack of effective
business continuity planning. A lack of
core application solutions has delayed
the process further. From the public
cloud standpoint, the issues are around
regulation, location, liability and
recoverability in the cloud. These factors
may have slowed down adoption and
deployment of cloud computing and led
most banks to start building mini ‘private’
infrastructure clouds.
To reduce this risk, the management
of the infrastructure that underpins
these computing environments needs to
move away from complex IT provisioning
requests to the presentation of a series
of standardized services. Reaching this
state is the beginning of the journey to
the cloud.
Future scenario
Private clouds have their place in
enterprise IT, but they might not provide
the cost benefits, economies of scale
and ROI associated with public clouds.
Customers looking to leverage the cloud
for complex workloads, which need
high levels of security and compliance,
are moving towards the private cloud
model. For certain workloads such as
collaboration they look to leverage public
clouds which provide them with an OPEX
model.
Banks must consider looking at
external clouds. Given their concerns
around security and control, banks can
follow an incremental approach, applying
cloud computing to non-core operations
first, with fewer applications and move
more to the cloud as they see the
benefits.
Finally, the banks need to know
that this is all about ‘business model
transformation’ and achieve business
agility for the next level of growth. n
Parag Arora is Vice President, Financial Services
Industry, Cisco India
www.informationweek.in
 opinion
Vikram Watave / Patni
Moving from virtualization to private cloud
The period from 2005 to 2010 has
undoubtedly been dominated by
virtualization. The ‘virtualization’ trickle
turned into a flood during recession,
when CIOs used this technology to
consolidate servers and save huge CAPEX
and OPEX related costs. However, even
as virtualized environments continued
to expand, it introduced new layers of
complexity. Organizations discovered
that with virtualization, it was easy for
any user with sufficient administrative
privileges to create new virtual machines.
Over a period of time, these organizations
started facing the reality of managing
a large number of virtual machines on
different heterogeneous platforms. While
there were reduced number of servers as
compared to the physical world, virtual
machines were difficult to track and
monitor.
As a result, organizations started
facing the issue of ‘virtual machine
sprawl’ — a phenomenon created by
the deployment of virtual machines
without proper inventory control.
Without proper management of virtual
instances, virtual machines quickly
spiraled out of control defeating the
purpose for what the technology was
deployed. Using the same tools that were
used for monitoring physical machines,
organizations manually performed
activities such as upgrades and patches
on virtual machines. In this new world of
virtualization, the agility and automation,
that could serve as the foundation for,
self-service IT remained elusive.
Why private clouds are
required
To function efficiently, a virtual machine
needs to respond and exchange
intelligence in a bi-directional way with
the storage and network infrastructure.
For example, when virtual machines
move between physical servers, the
associated IT infrastructure such as
storage, network, bandwidth or say, a
security policy does not move. Hence,
virtual machines need a management
layer so that the enterprise can see every
IT component from a single console and
apply a policy to a specific virtual machine
or across the entire IT infrastructure.
For instance, by combining intelligence
gained from capacity management with
performance management, organizations
can prevent over provisioning and enable
an on-demand model.
Vendors too are moving in this
direction. For example, Cisco recently
signed up alliances with EMC and VMware
wherein Cisco will provide the networking
and server component, EMC will provide
the storage infrastructure, while VMware
will contribute the virtualization piece
that enables management. This will
create an IT infrastructure which can
dynamically respond to changes, which
is not happening today in virtual server
environments.
What if an enterprise could provide
dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning
of machines and resources, via a
centralized portal? What if upgrades,
patches and policies could be applied
from a central console? What if
developers or users could deploy or
consume applications via a self-service
portal without any manual intervention?
What if a performance monitoring
console automatically placed workloads
on virtual IT resources according to the
demands made on the application? All
this can be made possible with private or
internal clouds. This can form the basis of
self-service IT.
The building blocks of a
private cloud
The true essence of virtualization is
enabling dynamic provisioning that
is automated and delivered using a
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k
self-service model. However, many
enterprises use tools that require manual
provisioning which restricts the benefits
of virtualization in providing agility. The
real benefit of a private cloud comes
due to the fact that the enterprise has
the capability to see IT resources such
as servers, storage and networks as a
single pool that can be provisioned and
de-provisioned on demand.
In addition to virtualization, the
following characteristics differentiate a
private cloud:
Automation: In a virtualized
environment, as the number of virtual
servers per physical server continue
to increase, it becomes extremely
challenging for the IT team to manually
manage processes such as patches and
upgrades. Automation is critical for not
only doing away with manual tasks, but
also for standardizing key processes
such as application releases, patches
and upgrades. Automation also helps
in proactively identifying problems,
and in provisioning and de-provisioning
machines according to defined thresholds.
Self-Service: Private clouds also
allow the enterprise to enforce efficient
usage of IT through a method of metering
and chargeback model, wherein business
units are billed for the resources
consumed. Self-Service is an extremely
powerful idea as it empowers customers
to consume computer resources
according to their requirements. With
well-defined metering and chargeback
models, private clouds encourage smart
consumption of IT resources as business
units consume only those IT resources
that are vital to them. For the enterprise,
self-service models are a huge advantage
as it gives the CIO a top level view of what
kind of resources or applications are in
demand, what are the costs associated,
and what kind of improvements can be
made to further cut down costs and boost
51
opinion
efficiency. In essence, using a private
cloud, enterprises can deliver IT as a
service to internal customers.
How can you make this
happen?
If you have a legacy infrastructure, start
by implementing virtualization – across
servers, storage and networks. Once
your infrastructure is fully virtualized,
use virtualization management software
to track, manage and monitor virtual
machines. Use appropriate software to
automate and centralize management of
server, storage and network resources.
This software must also give enterprises
the capability to do upgrades, patches and
maintenance from a single console.
Once this infrastructure is in place,
create a self-service portal that is linked
to a chargeback model with defined
SLAs and QoS metrics. Ideally, start with
one or two departments to understand
consumption patterns, customer
demands and the overall effectiveness
of the model. Ideally, a service catalog
provided on a self-service portal will
enable organizations to recover their IT
costs quickly, as business users consume
only what they need and IT builds and
delivers only what is needed. Self-service
portals help in serving computing
resources on demand, measuring
consumption dynamically and in providing
real time resource allocation. The private
cloud infrastructure must be governed by
a comprehensive governance framework
that enables organizations to define and
enforce a policy across the organization.
Policies could include parameters such as
security, QoS, bandwidth and integration.
How private clouds deliver
Besides encouraging smart consumption
of IT resources, private clouds are ‘elastic’
in nature. Any spike in demand such as
say, launch of a new product, or handling
e-commerce sales during festival seasons
can be handled effectively by a private
cloud.
Private clouds and virtualization
can also accelerate the drive towards
hardware standardization. For example,
live migration of virtual machines is
52 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
Critical differences between virtualized
infrastructure and a private cloud
Virtualized Infrastructure Private Cloud
Preventive maintenance or activities Gives enterprises the capability to automatically
such as upgrades and patches are apply upgrades, patches and do maintenance from
performed either by manually or with a central console.
partial automation.
Provisioning and de-provisioning of Provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual
virtual machines are done either machines is automated and done dynamically.
manually or with partial automation.
Does not allow users to consume IT Self-service capability allows IT users such as
resources on their own. developers, infrastructure teams to consume IT
resources on their own.
Lack of chargeback or metering model. With well-defined metering and chargeback
models, private clouds encourage smart
consumption of IT resources as business units
will consume only those IT resources that are
vital to them.
possible only if the processors are from cloud, while some can reside in the private
the same vendor. cloud space. An enterprise can set up a
The end objective for organizations private cloud, and use the public cloud to
that migrate to a private cloud is to handle spikes in processing requirements.
achieve the capability to offer IT-as-a- As public clouds charge only for actual
service to internal business units through usage, enterprises can use the hybrid
a self service portal. Using this approach, model to handle loads in a cost-effective
the IT function grows beyond the role manner.
of support, and assumes the role of With chargeback and metering
driving the business. As a result, both features in place, a private cloud
the IT function and the business benefit. also encourages efficient usage of
Both sides gain due to automation of infrastructure, as users consume only
manual tasks. A self service portal, where those services that are crucial to their
employee enablement services can be businesses.
delivered using a cloud, is extremely For end users, the private cloud is a
beneficial as it enables enterprise boon. Take the case of a project head in a
users to consume specific services software company who wants to request
that they want, and get billed for only IT infrastructure. In the traditional case,
those services that they consume. As a the project head would have to put in
result, the role of IT gets dramatically a formal requisition for the hardware,
simplified and IT services can be offered software and the server needed. This
and deployed on demand by the users – could take two weeks just for approval
without the intervention of IT. and implementation. In the world of
Additionally, the organization has private clouds, the project head just logs
greater flexibility and agility in responding into a self-service portal and creates his
to dynamic business changes. More own virtual server with the necessary
importantly, IT has complete visibility software. The entire IT infrastructure is
into the type of services consumed. provisioned within a couple of hours. This
Once the foundation for a private cloud is just one example of the real power and
is established, organizations can offer potential of a private cloud. n
platforms and applications as services
(IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS). Organizations can
also consider a hybrid cloud model where Vikram Watave is Vice President – IMS, Patni
some assets can be put in the public
www.informationweek.in
 CISO Perspective
Cloud Computing: Understanding the risks
By Faraz Ahmed
The Cloud Security Alliance describes
cloud as the use of a collection of
services, applications, information, and
infrastructure comprised of pools of
compute, network, information, and
storage resources which can be rapidly
orchestrated, provisioned, implemented
and decommissioned, and scaled up or
down; providing for an on-demand utility-
like model of allocation and consumption.
Phew! Quite a mouthful, yet there
is not one bit of concurrence among
experts. To add to the confusion, there
are some pretty complex decisions to be
made regarding which model of cloud
computing one needs to select. Do I use
IaaS, PaaS or SaaS? And one is spoiled
for choices at the available deployment
models: Public Cloud, Private Cloud,
Community Cloud or Hybrid Cloud.
Today, many organizations are
exploring the skies and looking to ride
the cloud in their endeavor to optimize
and reduce costs and also reduce delivery
cycles to business. However, most of these
organizations are struggling to select the
appropriate vendor.
Comparing cloud service providers
is like comparing clouds in the sky, each
one is unique and has its own nuances,
but never the less, organizations should
be clear about the purpose of using
cloud services and its risk appetite.
In my view, some top concerns on
using the cloud are as follows:
Financial strength: Organizations
have to check the provider’s financial
ability to deliver the services for a period
of time for which the contract may be
agreed upon. Cloud is a promising and
upcoming area and you have to evaluate
how you will be impacted if your provider
is acquired. In the rapidly changing
technology world, it’s just a matter
of time before what is being offered
becomes obsolete and one may be forced
to upgrade. This can upset financial
calculations.
Information handling: How is your
information being stored, processed
and delivered? What are the risks and
how can this be minimized? Which
individuals have access to your data?
Do you trust the providers’ outsourced
vendors to handle your data? Where is
your data stored? What happens to the
backup copy of the file you just deleted
from your cloud storage? What kind of
physical security does your provider’s
data centre have?
Lock in: Many providers may use
proprietary tools and technologies, and
organizations need to invest time and
resources to customize the solutions for
their needs and since the cloud is out in
the open, how does one ensure the same
is not made available to competition?
This would also mean vendor lock-in and
duplication of efforts in changing the
service provider.
Data location: One needs to have
clarity on the location of data. After
all, you cannot secure it if you don’t
know where it is. This may also become
a major issue in an event of a disaster
and you require access to your data for
recovery and if necessary, for forensics
examination.
SLA and audit rights: Many cloud
providers have standard non negotiable
SLAs that do not allow you to audit their
facilities. An organization must look at
how this will impact their compliance
requirements, as this may lead to
non compliance of certain regulatory
standards. Selection of a service
provider must be done after careful
consideration of the SLA agreement
and the organization’s security and risk
concerns. To address this issue, granular
and least privileged model of access with
detailed audit logs is required to assure
transparency and build trust between the
provider and user.
Compliance: Trans-border
information flow is a very critical
element of the contract as you want
to ensure that you have access to
systems and forensic evidence in case
of any unfortunate events. Careful
consideration must be given to the
locations of the service provider and
facilities being used to deliver the
service as they may exist across various
geographies. Some of these geographies
may not be extremely accommodating to
compliance and regulatory requirements.
In certain cases, privacy regulations of
certain businesses and geographies may
not allow the data to be hosted on a
cloud platform as the data is out of your
network.
Certifications: As no standards
currently exist for security and services
delivered out of the cloud, one will have
to rely on existing standards and best
practices.
Conclusion
A sound risk management program is
required to address the above concerns.
This must ideally start with a detailed
information and asset inventory that
identifies and labels all information
assets, their owners and importance and
priority of data in an event of a disaster. n
Faraz Ahmed is Head - Information Security,
Reliance Life Insurance
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 53
 opinion
Pallavi Kathuria / Microsoft India
An open cloud
As one of the most disruptive
technologies of our times – cloud
Computing brings with itself new
challenges and goalposts for
interoperability on two broad areas
— with the existing on-premise IT
infrastructures, as well as among various
clouds platforms. The promise of this
new technology is reduced to a fraction
if it does not work with the existing
technologies seamlessly.
While more and more businesses
and organizations look to embrace
cloud computing, one of the pre-
conditions for any new investment
in a cloud-based solution is that the
latter would supplement the existing IT
infrastructure — instead of creating new
silos of applications and data. Businesses
also demand the assurance of data
security and portability. Finally, they
want the ability to migrate their existing
applications to the cloud easily without
having to rewrite the applications
grounds up in a new language that a
given cloud platform mandates.
Summing up these three core
requirements as often articulated by
businesses, it is easy to see that the core
demand is for a cloud platform that is
both open and interoperable. According
to Sanchit Vir Gogia, Associate Research
Manager at Springboard Research,
“While cloud computing has gathered
much steam in the recent past; CIOs have
identified security and interoperability as
key issues impeding rampant adoption.
The key is to offer seamless movement
across cloud environments and develop
industry-wide standards that work with
most vendors and service partners.”
In other words, openness and
interoperability for a cloud platform
will allow businesses to harness the
full potential of cloud computing and
54 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
therefore aid in cloud adoption by more
and more businesses. Clearly, the case
for promoting openness on the cloud
cannot be stronger for leading cloud
vendors.
Data portability is the first element
of interoperability — which enables
businesses to move their data in and out
of any cloud application or platform to
another cloud platform, or even back
to an on-premise deployment, without
losing fidelity. Data portability is more
than a fundamental requirement for an
open cloud — it is the core assurance
that any business, or a government will
seek before embracing cloud computing.
Secondly, an open cloud platform
and its applications must support as
many existing and evolving standards
that would make it easier for applications
and platforms to interconnect. An open
cloud platform must support multiple
Internet protocols including HTTP, XML,
SOAP and REST, and other key cloud
standards – including Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) frameworks for data
centers and virtualized systems, web
standards like SOAP, REST, AtomPub,
and federated security standards – that
provide the building blocks for open,
interoperable cloud services.
In fact, a healthy industry and user
momentum is already building up for
laying down security and interoperability
standards for the cloud. The launch
of ‘Open Data Centre Alliance’ – a
consortium of leading global IT
managers with over USD 50 billion in
collective IT spending was a big step
forward. The ODCA has released its
usage model roadmap, which includes
19 usage models that address technical
requirements for data center and
cloud infrastructure and is based on
open, interoperable solutions. This is
designed to be interoperable across
data centers. In the past too, there
have been broader security guidelines
from ENISA (European Network and
Information Security Agency) and Cloud
Security Alliance. The Jericho Forum’s
Self-assessment Scheme (SAS) is also a
great example of industry stakeholders
coming together to address the security
concerns about cloud adoption.
Coming back to the broader topic,
the third key attribute of an open cloud
is ease of migration and deployment,
which addresses the process of migrating
existing IT assets to the cloud. Cloud
platforms should provide a secure
migration path that preserves existing
investments and should enable the
co-existence between on-premise
software and cloud services. This will
enable customers to run “private clouds”
and partners (including hosters) to
run “partner clouds”, as well as take
advantage of public cloud platform
services. Finally, a cloud platform is
open when it offers choice to application
developers to use any programming
language or tool of their choice.
While these principles form the
bedrock of an open cloud platform,
there are a host of initiatives from cloud
vendors to further help make the end-
user transition to the cloud easier.
Ultimately it is the customers who
get to benefit from the advantages
offered by cloud computing, without
getting hampered by concerns on data
security, portability and access. And
anything that is good for the customers
is good for the IT industry – resulting in a
win-win situation for all. n
Pallavi Kathuria is Director – Server Business at
Microsoft India
www.informationweek.in
interview S t e fa n V a n O v e r t v e l d t / M a s t e k
‘Adaptive Case Management is the next
big thing for business process automation’
The Rs 722 crore enterprise solutions provider Mastek,
catering to companies in insurance, government, and financial
services sectors, is preparing for the next wave in computing.
Stefan Van Overtveldt, Chief Engineer Officer, Mastek tells
Brian Pereira about consumer-led trends in these industries,
and how Mastek is preparing for its “third wave” by pursuing
an industry trend called Adaptive Case Management for
business process optimization.
What are the shifts that you observe in consumer behavior
and how is the insurance industry responding?
We see two big drivers from a business perspective. There is
an increasing shift of power into the hands of the customer.
There are things like self-service portals, and now customers
are also empowered by their mobile phones. For instance
in North America, customers in insurance companies file a
declaration of a car accident using their mobile phones. They
take a picture of the accident scene and make a declaration
of the accident through their smart
phones. This speeds up the
process since the details are
being submitted immediately.
There is another trend
in various industries to
optimize the business
processes internally — for
all these customers.
Hence, these two
trends are related. We see
this trend on the horizon in
the Indian market.
What is being done on
the business process
optimization side to address
these shifts?
Traditionally, business process
optimization has always been
centered on factory business
processes. It works in
environments that are
highly predictable. The
process tends to be
fixed, but the data
follows the process.
56 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
Consider environments like Government, where they
provide citizen services; Insurance, where they do things
like underwriting, life insurance policies, or investigating
claims against medical insurance policy. All of a sudden you
are no longer talking about a fixed process. An individual or
knowledge worker (in the back office) looks at a specific case,
and ensures that he has all the data associated with that case,
and that may trigger sub-processes. Based on the information
gathered, he can make a decision that actually defines what
the rest of the process will look like.
What about the variations in rules and regulations across
countries and also among states within a country? How do
you factor these variations when designing the product?
This is a massive challenge for us. We do a lot of work in the
insurance sector in North America, which is not a unified
market. The US has 50 states and multiple languages that you
need to support. It has different rules for life insurance policy
in all 50 states. There is an enormous amount of variation in
the process. So the process becomes flexible and is driven by
the data — the process changes according to the data.
To address this, there is a trend in the industry called
Adaptive Case Management. This is the next big thing for
business level, IT-driven process automation. This technology
will have the biggest impact in environments where the
knowledge management aspect is dramatic.
Does adaptive case management work on the cloud?
While the processes can be outsourced or hosted elsewhere,
the question is: what happens to the data? Some countries
mandate that the data stays within the country or within the
company data center. We recognize this as a fundamental
issue. So we built technology that allows you to anonymize
data, not just at the data base level, but also data that is
in-flight. By ‘anonymize’ we mean take the data and apply a
set of rules based on the access levels and other pre-defined
parameters. Based on these rules, the data is scrambled
around. For instance, we scramble the digits in a 16-digit credit
card number. This is not data encryption as the data is still
visible. The scrambled data can be reconstituted later. n
Brian Pereira (brian.pereira@ubm.com)
www.informationweek.in
case study
Bringing people together on one platform
Fast paced growth, a large and scattered user base, and hordes of skeptical users pose
many challenges while transitioning to a new messaging and collaboration platform. Here’s
how Electrotherm got round these challenges
By Brian Pereira
Electrotherm (India) is a major
manufacturer of induction melting
furnaces and refining equipments.
Founded in 1984, the company offers
state-of-art technology in steel melting
and refining equipment to help the steel
industry produce steel more efficiently
through the induction furnace route.
More than 18 million tons of steel is
produced on equipment, manufactured
and supplied by Electrotherm every
year. Despite a volatile steel sector last
year, Electrotherm grew its business
across its key offerings. The company
has grown rapidly over the last six
years, and was rated as the fastest
growing midsized BSE-listed company in
India in 2008 by Dalal Street, growing
at a CAGR of 92 percent. The company
has transformed itself successfully,
from a pure B2B company specializing
in selling high value engineering and
metallurgical equipments, to a B2B and
B2C organization with the introduction
of industrial products for the retail
segments. The company is present
at five locations with its corporate
office and data center located in
Ahmedabad.
To prepare for the next level of
productivity and growth, Electrotherm
needed a technology solution to
streamline collaboration across its
multiple business segments. It also
wanted to create a dynamic repository
of business knowledge. It wanted an
affordable solution to address the needs
of its business.
“As we were growing so quickly,
electrotherm
“By migrating from a distributed
architecture to a single site, we have
reduced the cost of running our email
platform by 60 percent”
Vishad Rahangdale, CIO, Electrotherm (India)
our biggest challenge was synergizing
the people and bringing them on one
platform. Since we are an R&D driven
company, we required a mechanism to
protect our intellectual property,” said
Vishad Rahangdale, CIO, Electrotherm
(India).
To counter these challenges
Electrotherm devised a three-pronged
strategy. Firstly, on the connectivity
side, it had to make its backbone
infrastructure robust; secondly, it needed
to introduce some innovation in its data
center; and thirdly, it needed a solution
for communication, collaboration
and security, with a central support
mechanism.
“First we deployed the backbone
infrastructure and chose MPLS. Earlier
it was Point-to-Point from a service
provider. Then we introduced some
innovation in our data center,” informed
Rahangdale.
Electrothem was also looking for
the right hardware for its data center—
hardware that would offer scalability,
redundancy and business continuity.
The choice of hardware was determined
after selecting the software solution.
For the third requirement
(communication and collaboration), the
company chose to deploy Microsoft
Exchange, Hyper-V, SharePoint, Microsoft
Office 2010 and Office Communications
Server (OCS).
The project began with the
evaluation stage in May and June 2010.
The hardware deployment began at the
end of November 2010. And the system
went online at the end of December
2010. The actual implementation
happened in less than a month — thanks
to the 24x7 support of all the vendors
involved in the project. However, the
SharePoint implementation is yet to be
completed, informed Rehangdale.
“By way of innovation in the data
center, we are using Microsoft’s Hyper-V
virtualization and HP’s high availability
solution,” added Rahangdale.
Since it was already using
Microsoft’s operating systems and office
automation solutions, Electrotherm
opted for Microsoft’s communication
and collaboration solution — rather than
choose an alternative like Lotus Notes or
an open source solution.
“Since we stuck to Microsoft’s
platform, the user experience was not
changing,” said Rahangdale.
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 57
case study

Challenges
However, the transition to the new
system was not an easy one and the
company faced three challenges. Firstly,
there was resistance from people in the
organization.
“People were suspicious about their
work being monitored as they came on
to the domain. Another challenge was
transitioning a huge base of users,” said
Rahangdale.
Earlier its user base was in a
workgroup environment. It was a
humongous task shifting such a large
user base into an Active Directory
environment. On the technology front,
there was skepticism about the failure
of the new solution, and how that
failure should be addressed through
a fallback plan.
“Lastly, with the older open source
solution, mails were getting lost. So
there was always a concern about this
happening with the new system too.
We found that theoretically it takes 48
hours to populate the global DNS. But
in fact, it starts populating after just
four hours. We said if that doesn’t work
we can revert to the older system and
there would be a delay/downtime of only
four hours. We also decided to do a pilot
test of the new system for a week and
then deploy it live. But users were not
convinced, because they did not want to
miss important communications during
the transition period,” said Rahangdale.
However, Rahangdale and his team top-down approach to convince users. “The main benefit was really the user
found a workaround by deploying Top management communicated the experience and user acceptance.”
parallel systems for messaging. The various benefits to the users. They He added, “Response times have
trick was maintaining two MX record said the intention is not to monitor, but improved and obviously we can make
entries—these are used when preparing to offer better IT services. This would faster decisions. The mail delivery time
to send SMTP mail to a remote system. reduce the time for deploying services. is less than a second today. This has
One was kept at Electrotherm’s data It would also sync addresses with the made everyone more proactive. These
center and the other with its service global address book,” said Rahangdale. changes are visible too. Even our most
provider. So this solved the problem of But apart from these, there were remote location like Belari is now easily
mails not reaching recipient mailboxes—if other challenges on the compliance accessible.”
these could not reach user mailboxes in and communications fronts. He did not Summing it up in his own imitable
Electrotherm’s data center then these elaborate further on these challenges. style, Rahangdale said the management
would automatically be redirected to the feels “his organization is no longer
service provider, from where they could Benefits walking—it is running!” n
later be accessed. Since the project was driven largely
And how did he get round to cajoling out of a business need, there were no
users to accept the new system? upfront expectations for ROI. Speaking Brian Pereira (brian.pereira@ubm.com)
“At the user level, we had to take a about the key benefits, Rahangdale said,

58 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
book review
The business value of
technology
Preparing for the Cloud
Having the right IT strategy can ensure that
your business is on track to achieve organic
growth and profits, and that it has a cutting
edge over the competition.
Cloud Computing seems to be the most So what constitutes a right IT strategy for
talked-about technology today. But it’s also business? What kind of impact can IT have on
the least understood term. In fact, there your business? How does a company strike a
is no single, unified definition for it. Some balance between business and technology?
organizations/individuals think virtualization IT Strategy for Business sets out to
is synonymous with Cloud. But there is a lot of answer some of these questions. The book
explains how a firm can strike a perfect
Cloud Computing balance between technology and business,
Implementation, Management and Security and gives a practical insight into IT strategies
John W Rittinghouse, James F Ransome for all kinds of enterprises.
It acquaints the reader with different
CRC Press
aspects of IT and business strategies and
Available at: Computer Bookshop, Mumbai their cross linking through various strategic
initiatives. While other books on this subject
interest, particularly for private clouds in India. position IT as a technology, and elaborate on
Organizations that are planning a journey to the cloud should have a thorough its management aspects, this book positions
understanding of the IT services model and Service Oriented Architecture. IT as a strategic business infrastructure and
Cloud Computing — Implementation, Management and Security offers knowledge catalyst.
an accurate description of cloud computing, explores how disruptive it Some important topics discussed in
may become in future, and examines its advantages and disadvantages. this book are: IT management, e-strategies,
The authors take us through the evolution of cloud computing. Then they outsourcing and offshoring, knowledge
survey some of the critical components that are necessary to make the management, and various stages and facets
cloud computing paradigm feasible. They also present various standards of IT strategy implementation; the role of IT in
based on the use and implementation issues surrounding cloud computing areas such as M&A and IT security. n
and describe the infrastructure management that is maintained by cloud
computing service providers. The book concludes with a hard look at
successful cloud computing vendors and the cloud management tools and
services they offer.
The book would have been more complete with the inclusion of a few real-
life case studies of companies that moved their legacy infrastructure to the
cloud — and the challenges they faced in doing so. It would also be interesting
to learn about various cloud computing forums around the world and their
efforts to promote cloud standards. Perhaps there should be a separate
chapter on regulatory and compliance aspects, and how these norms vary
across geographies.
But it makes up for these deficiencies with interesting topics that you may
not find in other books on cloud computing. For instance, we enjoyed reading
about the potential of smartphones connected to the cloud. And the grand
finale before the end of the book is an executive scenario for cloud migration.
It’s a hypothetical case of a fictitious company considering a move to cloud-
based operations. Here you’ll read about the different views that the CEO, CFO,
VPs and EVPs have about the business. Then we hear about the CIO’s struggles IT Strategy for Business
in keeping up with all their expectations. We won’t spoil the element of surprise
Authors: Parag Kulkarni, Pradip K. Chande
by telling you how that CIO overcomes these struggles. The cloud had a lot to
do with it, of course. Oxford University Press
This is a must-read for every CIO. n

60 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1 www.informationweek.in
feature
Six ways to fail in the cloud
Our latest survey shows double-digit increases in cloud adoption. But ignore
integration, management and monitoring at your peril
By Michael Healey
Our 2011 InformationWeek Analytics
State of Cloud Computing Survey shows
a 67 percent increase in the number of
companies using cloud services, up from
18 percent in February 2009 and 30
percent in October 2010. IT now has a
choice: Grab ownership of what’s poised
to be a core part of the enterprise
technology toolset, or shortchange
key functions and set ourselves up for
disaster.
This shouldn’t be a hard call, yet
over and over we see CIOs underfund
or ignore six major areas: integration,
security, connectivity, monitoring,
continuity planning, and
long-term staffing. Only 29
percent of companies using or
planning to use the cloud have
evaluated its impact on their
architectures. Just 20 percent
implement monitoring of
applications and throughput;
40 percent don’t have any
monitoring in place. Talk
about blind trust.
There’s a misperception
that it’s smaller
companies driving the
cloud usage upswing.
But don’t write
off management
shortfalls as an SMB
problem; we saw
almost the same rates of
use and planned use regardless
61 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
CLOUD PERFORMANCE
of company size, once we delved into
the data. There are now viable cloud
options for almost every layer of the
technology stack — from raw computing,
storage, databases, and utilities to
e-mail to the spectrum of enterprise
applications, all with a “point, click, go”
functionality that has maverick business
units everywhere rejoicing. Ignore
management at your peril.
Cloud vendors Boomi, Cast Iron, and
Jitterbit are focused solely on offering
integration services for less money
and in less time, and they’re shaking up
established firms like Informatica and
Oracle-SAP as well as EDI players like
Ariba, Hubspan, and Sterling Commerce.
Boomi and Cast Iron have been acquired
by Dell and IBM, respectively. Both
buyers cited the benefits of offering
streamlined integration connections
across the enterprise. Earlier last year,
IBM, acknowledging gaps in its cloud
integration, also bought Sterling, one of
the larger EDI players.
This is a new twist to interoperability
that is available only within the cloud.
Previously, there just wasn’t scale to
build multitenant integration services.
But now, integration services have
become clouds themselves--middleware
as a service, if you will. The more
options and connections they have, the
more competitive they become and the
more monthly subscriptions they get.
Will they make it? Yes. There’s a fortune
in margins in integration, especially
if you have scale, and the financial
performance of these vendors is
impressive.
Security: Safety
First
“We won’t be involving our
security team in this project
until the last possible moment,
because the answer will be ‘no.’”
That from a VP at one of the largest
retailers in the world. He’s evaluating
march 2011 i n f o r www.informationweek.in
m at i o n w e e k 61
feature
a cloud-centric initiative that could
dramatically improve the company’s
operations. He went on to say that
bringing the CISO in without building
the entire plan beforehand is a death
knell for any project.
Think this isn’t going on in your
shop? Keep sipping the happy juice.
This VP guaranteed that end runs are
standard practice among his peers. And
the standard mantra of “it’s against
compliance rules” won’t only make you
seem out of touch — you may well be
wrong. PCI 2.0, the rules that govern the
security of credit and debit card data,
was just released and has little specific
guidance for cloud computing per se,
but it does lay out clearer rules relating
to off-premises transactions. In addition,
Amazon recently announced that its
Elastic Compute Cloud is certified for
conducting Level 1 transactions; the
company will begin offering that service
this year. The next official PCI standard
will likely have in-depth rules for cloud
computing, but it won’t be released until
2013.
Security teams take note: There’s a
new set of guidelines, and a major cloud
vendor has a platform certified for some
level of transactions that are subject to
PCI rules. If you think saying “Wait until
2013” is a good move for your business,
consider polishing up your resumé.
The better answer is providing
forward-thinking security and
connectivity guidelines that people
outside IT can understand and use. Make
sure your guide covers all the policies
you’ve established and explains the
outside compliance areas you’re forced
to adhere to. We discuss the seven key
areas that must be included in a cloud
policy in our full Analytics Report.
Connectivity: The Right
Connections
Just 29 percent of those using or
planning to use a cloud service have
scoped out the architectural impact
on their Internet infrastructures. You
should be running these numbers before
engaging any cloud provider.
“It’s the biggest miss we see,”
62 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
says Tom Elowson, president of
virtualization cloud provider Acxess.
“We have bandwidth conversation
with potential clients everyday. If they
haven’t analyzed their existing usage
and started to calculate the potential
impact, we usually push back.”
Start with the outbound volume
to reach the resource, and take into
account back-end traffic to update
data. Bandwidth calculations also
need to factor in data and user growth
over a five-year period, same as ROI
calculations. Get solid trending stats on
usage and volume over the course of
several weeks. If you don’t, you could be
looking at a major fumble.
Monitoring: Watch And
Learn
Thirty-nine percent of poll respondents
say they don’t monitor their cloud
vendors, while an additional 40 percent
rely on basic “up/down” tools that are
no better than a periodic ping. The
latter group’s sole advantage is they’ll
have a 30-second warning before the
complaints start rolling in.
How to stay on track? First, invest
in data flow monitoring internally.
Less than 15 percent of respondents
have systems in place that monitor
application and transactional
throughput. Basic status alerting is
nice, but you need to be watching your
network data flows and have established
What are your company’s plans for cloud computing?
2010 2009
Receiving services today from a cloud provider
18%
Planning to use services from a cloud provider within the next 12 months
13%
9%
Considering using services from a cloud provider
24%
25%
No plans to use services from a cloud provider
Source: InformationWeek Analytics State of Cloud Computing Survey of 607 business technology
professionals in October 2010 and 547 in February 2009
performance levels for every application
before you add an external cloud.
Once your house is in order,
connect with your bandwidth provider
and establish ground rules around
monitoring of traffic, your lines, and
how you share data. Set up remote
monitoring points outside of your main
office. Assemble a set of cloud-based
monitoring tools. Yes, a cloud app to
watch your cloud apps. Go beyond the
basic utilities that Amazon, GoGrid,
Google, and others provide to add
overall monitoring of all Internet traffic.
Continuity: Get Backup
All companies ask their cloud vendors,
“Do you back up our data?” The answer
is always some variant of yes. However,
the majority of cloud designs focus on
backup and point-in-time failover — not
archiving.
Always establish a cloud service
backup and archiving schedule the same
way you would for any internal resource.
Start with your current vendor. Many,
like CommVault and Symantec, are
working to establish options for
extending internal backup and archiving
systems to manage cloud-based data.
All systems have outages, whether
they’re in house or in the cloud. Focus
on what vendors will agree to in their
service-level agreements vs. what
your internal teams will commit to for
their in-house SLAs. The “five-nines”
30%
33%
48%
www.informationweek.in
mantra (99.999 percent) that dominates
Cloud’s impact on internet-facing architecture
discussion among Tier 1 data vendors
Have you examined the potential impact of a cloud service on your Internet-facing architecture?
simply isn’t heard in the cloud. At
best, your uptime will be between 99.9 Yes
Don’t know
percent and 99.95 percent. Decide:
What is the plan for the business 29%
if there’s an outage? When do you
8%
implement the failover plan? Who makes
the call? These are all familiar themes No, and we have
no plans to do so 6%
to business continuity pros, but with an
external twist.
Software as a service should 30% Not yet, but we plan to
have, at minimum, manual processes 27%
documented for users. In the case Not yet, but we will before
of a CRM or project management adopting any new services
application, you may want a separate
cloud or in-house system that could Source: InformationWeek Analytics 2011 State of Cloud Computing Survey of 408 business technology
be activated in the event of a major professionals using, planning to use, or considering cloud computing services, October 2010
failure. For high-volume services, such
as e-mail or EDI transactions, design a U.S. Department of Labor stats. Cloud
system that not only queues ongoing STAFFING: BUILD YOUR BENCH and related hosting services companies
transactions for short outages but has IT as a profession is at a turning point. have had flat job growth for the past
the ability to fail over completely. These While the cloud may be hot, there year. Blame economies of scale. But
aren’t small projects; plan to devote hasn’t been a boom in hiring by these just because the quantity of jobs is
engineering time and funding. vendors, according to the most recent down doesn’t mean you’ll easily find
IT pros who can deftly manage vendor
What are your top concerns related to cloud services? relationships, not just technology
platforms.
2010 2009 Our 2010 State of Outsourcing
Security defects in the technology itself Survey showed that nearly six of
53% 10 IT shops outsource some critical
57% function — management, engineering,
Unauthorized access to or leak of our proprietary information or development. So you can see the
50% staffing challenge CIOs face. This is a
53% major gap that won’t necessarily go
Unauthorized access to or leak of our customers’ information away through market forces attracting
49% additional talent to meet your needs.
47% You need to start building your own
Application and system performance talent bench.
32%
Get ready for a wild ride. Capital
32%
expenditures used to provide a brake,
Business viability of provider; risk company will fail
regulating the pace of internal service
28%
30% adoption. That’s come off with the
Business continuity and disaster recovery readiness of provider cloud, so IT teams need to build new
26% policies and platform models that
22% will protect the company as business
Vendor lock-in activity gets rolling. That’s because,
23% once cloud apps become part of the
17% fabric, there’ll be no slowing down to
Features and general maturity of technology make adjustments. n
17%
19%
Michael Healey is president of consulting firm
Source: InformationWeek Analytics State of Cloud Computing Survey of 607 business technology Yeoman Technologies. Write to us at
professionals in October 2010 and 547 iwletters@techweb.com

MARCH 2011 I N F O R M AT I O N W E E K 63
CIO profile D aya P r a k a s h , H e a d - I T,
L G El e c t r o n i c s I n di a
Career Track
How long at the current company
I have been working with LG since 2001.
Most important career influencer
If I look back and try to pick the most important career
influencer for me, then it would be joining LG and getting
exposed to the Korean work culture. I was also fortunate to join
this organization, when it was trying to establish its footprint
in India. Passion, dynamism, openness and empowerment are
some of the salient features which have made it possible for
LG to become one of the key players in the consumer durable
industry in India.
Decision I wish I could do over
I strongly believe in the philosophy of “Life as an ongoing
journey” and we always remain a student as life teaches us
lessons of doing things better, everyday and in every moment.
Since decision making is all about choosing the best of all
options, there is no decision which stands true in all situations. If
one can look back with satisfaction in terms of achievement and
make a little difference to the society by giving back, there is no
decision one may need to completely redo. However, a person
must always be open to changes in order to
remain aligned to goals and visions.
VISION
The next big thing for my industry
will be…
The world is changing very fast and we
are witnessing a number of changes in
consumer preferences when it comes to
electronics. Gone are the days, when
the PC used to rule. Today’s world
is of tablets and smart phones. The
trends also show a great shift in the TV
market as it shifted from Flat Panel to
PDP/LCDs and now 3D/Full HD LEDs.
The next big wave would be Internet-
enabled TVs.
Advice for future CIOs
Some of the common advice I received
from my seniors is to dream big, stay
focussed, work hard and be sincere
and honest. These insights helped me
a lot to reach my present status.
However, I have learnt a few more
things through my own experience.
For instance, success is comparatively
64 in f o r m a tion w e e k ma rc h 2011
easy to come by if you follow your heart i.e. if you aspire to be a
CIO, you must love every aspect of your job. Do not differentiate
in tasks related to core IT or business. Go that extra mile to
gain that business insight as the role of a CIO is continuously
evolving. You must possess thorough knowledge of various
technologies to help yourself and your organization to stay
ahead of competition.
I am yet to learn the art of saying ‘no’, maybe because so
far, it has given me more than what it would have taken away
from me. I love to interact with budding CIOs — to discuss
challenges or issues they have at hand. I like to interact and
mentor these CIOs.
ON THE JOB
Top three initiatives
One of the recent initiatives which we took was to bring in
corporate IT governance by implementing Global Single Instance
of ERP at LG. I am pleased to mention that we successfully
completed the project within a targeted schedule. Some of the
other high priority initiatives, we are currently working on, are
Business Intelligence and CRM.
How I measure IT effectiveness
LG India’s operations are spread across the geography and are
represented by a corporate office at Greater Noida, two factories
(Greater Noida and Ranjangaon, Pune), 12 regional sales offices,
47 branch offices and over 100 area offices.
We have a scientific mechanism of measuring IT effectiveness
through the following ways:
l Periodic review of the cost Innovation with senior
management i.e. ROI on organizational activities through IT
initiatives
l By monitoring Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) which is
based on the user feedback captured through system on a
scale of 1 to 7
l Conducting a periodic survey to check Net Promoter Score
(NPS) across the organization
Personal
Leisure activities: I enjoy reading books, playing cricket and
lawn tennis. I like spending time with my family and friends.
Best book read recently: Maverick by Ricardo Semler.
Unknown talents (singing, painting etc): None that I know of.
If I weren't a CIO, I'd be... I definitely would have been in
academics. I want to pursue PhD someday. n
As told to Srikanth RP (srikanth.rp@ubm.com)
www.informationweek.in
 technology and risks
Avinash Kadam
Info leakages —
Control and cures
A reasonable No, this is not another article on Wikileaks.
This is about how to avoid any kind of
approach is to information leak. The type of information
build defence leaks exemplified by Wikileaks is a nightmare
for any information security professional.
in-depth by The information leak may have political
having multiple, significance or it may ruin the reputation
of a company. It may compromise years of
independent research work. It may jeopardize national
layers to protect security. Not everything will merit a mention
in Wikileaks. But the effect of these leaks
the information could be devastating. What is a reasonable
protection?
In the information security field, you can
never give an absolute guarantee. Information
is like ether. It will somehow find a way out.
A reasonable approach is to build defence in-
depth by having multiple, independent layers
to protect the information. Each layer should
be independent of other layers. And security
should be built as if each layer is the only
one to protect the information. Let us look at
how many layers could constitute a complete
defence in depth. I propose a seven-layer
model.
l Operating system
l Database system
l Application programs
l Network
l Operational
l Physical
l Personnel
You can imagine these layers as
concentric circles, guarding the information
which is at the core. Each of these layers is
capable of leading to leakage of information,
deliberate as well as inadvertent. A hacker
will try to find weaknesses in each of these
layers and carve out a path of least resistance
to reach to the core, which is the critical
information.
What are the measures to be implemented
in each layer? These depend on the classical
threat, vulnerability and risk assessment
model. Identify the vulnerabilities in each
layer, build a threat scenario and find the
likelihood of a plausible threat exploiting
a likely vulnerability. Deploy appropriate
controls to mitigate the risk to an acceptable
level.
If this is as simple, why do the leaks
happen? We have to look at our assumptions
of defence in depth. Did we really build each
layer totally self-sufficient, independent of
other layers? At each step, we will realize
that there is one layer which interfaces with
every other layer. This is the layer occupied
by personnel. Whichever of the following you
want to have — hardened operating system,
secure database, securely coded applications,
securely designed network, least privileges for
the users, tight access control, or complete
monitoring of every activity — we can never
do it without very reliable, trustworthy and
competent persons. This layer has to be
built with utmost care. Every ingenious way
of securing the other layers will fail, if the
personnel layer is not built with care.
There are various controls prescribed
for the personnel layer. They begin
with background checks, non-disclosure
agreements, and competency check.
Unfortunately these are more often treated
as mere formalities. During employment,
there are other safeguards like segregation of
duties, job rotation, mandatory vacations and
so on. Once again, these are mostly ignored
due to lack of trained persons. The result is,
we spend a lot of money on technical controls
and security devices, but are weak on trained,
competent and trustworthy manpower. It is
as if we spend huge amounts on buying the
most expensive aircrafts, but do not have
well-trained pilots. Remember, the totality
of the seven layers of defence in depth will
only be as strong as the weakest layer, i.e the
personnel layer. n
Avinash Kadam is Director, COO and Head of Delivery
at MIEL e-Security. He can be contacted at
awkadam@mielesecurity.com.
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 65
 global CIO
Chris Murphy
FedEx CIO explains the
real power of the cloud
Tempted to Leave it to Rob Carter, the CIO of FedEx,
to clarify what’s really powerful about cloud
dismiss the computing. Carter, the company’s CIO since
‘private cloud’ 2000 and an InformationWeek advisory board
member for almost as long, has a knack for
as the latest IT discussing technology in a way that cuts to
blather? Rob the business payoff, but without leaning on
buzzwords that whitewash the complexity
Carter has a involved.
new data center Carter boils down cloud computing,
when applied to IT infrastructure, to “general
in Colorado that purpose computing.” It’s the ability to connect
begs to differ servers, networking, and storage that are
“workload agnostic,” meaning the jobs they
handle can be shuffled around among a
company’s computers, so those machines are
used as efficiently as possible.
Just last fall, FedEx opened a new data
center in Colorado Springs based on this
idea of general purpose computing. It uses
commodity x86 servers, each with just a
single 10-gig Ethernet cord into the back for
networking, replacing the bevy of wires of
the past for host-bus adapters, NIC cards,
etc. Before applications move into the new
data center, they’re “commonized”--revised
to use the same database and messaging
technology, for example, so they can move
easily among servers. FedEx is using this
cloud infrastructure inside its own data
center — a private cloud — but Carter says
workloads could easily shift to public clouds
run by vendors such as Amazon and others, if
that made strategic sense down the road.
IT pros, jaded by relentless tech hype,
love to point out that, ‘this is nothing new.’
Mainframes have long done virtualization, so
a private cloud isn’t all that different. Cloud
computing understandably has triggered this
reflex, as every vendor tries to label what it
does as cloud. Some purists may also quibble
that what FedEx is doing isn’t really cloud, if
it’s not a fully self-provisioning and multi-
66 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2011
tenant environment.
Carter isn’t a bit worried about whether
any of this fits this or that cloud definition.
But he is unequivocal about this: The
highly virtualized computing environments
companies can build today are unlike anything
that has come before them. In his words:
“I started in the late ‘70s, right around
‘80, working this stuff, so I’ve ridden every
wave from mainframe to minicomputers to
PCs to client server to object-oriented — let’s
throw CASE in there somewhere back in the
‘80s — to Internet technologies. As those
waves crashed, we and everyone else have
remnants of those things. What’s happening
now — for the first time, in my opinion — is
there’s truly a general purpose computing
environment that’s workload-agnostic. You
can throw different kinds of workloads on
the same computing server infrastructure.
There’s network convergence — all the
networks are IP, there’s not a bunch of unique
protocols. And there’s converged storage
technology.” Then there’s software like Java
that can make it all “very portable across
platforms.”
Understand, Carter is not an easy sell on
the latest, greatest emerging technology. Back
when the world (including us at IW) was going
a bit gaga over RFID tracking technology,
Carter was a voice of reason. So when Carter
embraces a technology, I, for one, listen.
The economics of the technology change
are powerful. In FedEx’s case, it lets them
build a new data center and retrofit a second
one to this private cloud environment, fill
it with new hardware, rewrite the software
as needed to take advantage of this
environment, and still have a compelling ROI.
Says Carter:
“What’s happening, and this is such a big
deal in our world, is that for the first time ever,
you can make investments in a whole new
www.informationweek.in
class of technology for about the same
price of just maintaining the base.”
FedEx’s infrastructure
transformation really starts with
the applications. FedEx faced the
challenge of supporting a maze of apps
custom-coded to meet very specific
transportation and logistics needs. To
modernize those apps, Fed Ex is using a
services-based approach. The apps will
call on common data sources for 24 core
transportation-related services — say,
providing an address.
Likewise, they’ll all be put on a
common technology infrastructure-
-what FedEx calls its “data center
minimums.” That means they use
common foundations such as database
or messaging technology.
“We’re taking the application base
and running them through a factory
—we’re not just lifting and dropping
onto the virtualized environment,”
Carter says. No applications get into
the new data center until they meet the
minimums. Once completed, the effect
is that “the containers that hold those
apps in a virtual environment are very
portable.”
To Carter, the key
strategic decision he and
his team made was
to look at this
transformation as more than an effort to
cut overlapping applications; it wasn’t to
simply get rid of multiple billing systems,
for example. Instead, the key was to take
this services approach and then combine
it with a common environment and the
converged infrastructure of servers,
network, and storage.
“I can’t emphasize enough how
important it was for us to look at
consolidation of the infrastructure rather
than just application rationalization,”
Carter says. “Getting the applications to
run in a common framework, common
environment, makes it so much easier
for them to tap the new services that are
being set up, and make the workloads
more portable.”
Even with the cost to migrate those
apps to the new environment, to build
a new data center next to its existing
Colorado Springs location, and to equip it
with new gear, Carter says the effort still
has a very high ROI.
FedEx’s transition to the new data
center began last fall. The company has
a similar infrastructure setup on a small
scale in an existing data center, where
it runs the apps as a test before cutting
over. The pace of migrations will pick up
sharply from here, and Carter predicts
“enormous progress” over the next two
years in moving off older infrastructure.
So what about moving to public
cloud environments, the outfits like
Amazon that sell server computing
Chris Murphy is Editor of InformationWeek.
Write to Chris at cjmurphy@techweb.com
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k
power, storage, and other infrastructure
based on usage? There are business
model questions about that approach,
and questions around security and
compliance, but Carter sees no serious
technology barriers.
So will companies eventually move
to hybrid clouds, where workloads shift
between internal data centers and third
parties? Says Carter:
“There’s no question. We’re already
seeing it from the software standpoint,
with Salesforce and other things that
are integrated in our environments. I
believe infrastructure and platform [as
a service] are just looming out there —
whether it’s Amazon or Google or HP or
AT&T or whomever, it’s being built out all
over. And it just happens to look exactly
like what I’m talking about. It’s the same
stuff. So I have to worry about security
[in public clouds], but I don’t worry
about workload compatibility, I don’t
worry about network compatibility, and I
don’t worry about storage compatibility.
That’s what’s unique. The whole notion
of general purpose computing that
everyone refers to as cloud, be it public
or private or hybrid, looks like this
confluence of events that gives us
common server, storage, and
network technology.” n
67
 analyst angle
Sid Deshpande / Gartner
Cloud Computing can drive Indian CIOs
closer to business
Cloud computing is not a technology,
but a deployment model that enables
delivery of IT capabilities as a service by
leveraging the underlying ecosystem of
cloud enabling technologies. It has the
potential to help CIOs improve delivery
of IT to the organization and improve
business agility while simultaneously
reducing cost. The value proposition of
the cloud computing delivery models for
CIOs is clear, especially in a market like
India, which has traditionally seen cost-
conscious IT spending patterns.
Cloud computing adoption in
the country is restricted to large
organizations in select verticals such as
banking, financial services, government
and telecom. Most of these initial cloud
deployments are enterprise-owned
private cloud implementations as opposed
to off-premise public cloud services.
A recent survey of global survey of
large enterprises revealed that ‘improving
business agility’ was the top driver for
investing in cloud computing through 2011
for 66 percent of Indian respondents.
This clearly indicates that Indian CIOs are
in sync with global trends when it comes
to anticipated outcomes from cloud
computing investments.
The traction of public cloud
computing among enterprise CIOs is
minimal, and this status quo is likely to
continue in the near term — underscored
by the fact that public cloud offerings
from major Indian service providers
are currently only focused on the
SMB and developer segments. The
primary concerns about public cloud in
the country revolve around security,
service availability, location of data and
integration with on-premises systems.
68 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
2011 will see an expansion in the extent
and usage of private cloud in India, with
early adoption of best practices and
case studies being used to validate the
value proposition to more verticals and
segments within Indian enterprises.
Additionally, government validation of
the private cloud model (for example the
UID project which will emerge as one of
the largest private cloud deployments
in India) will go a long way in convincing
the skeptics among Indian CIOs. There
is a high probability that by 2015, many
Indian enterprises will adopt ‘hybrid’
cloud computing approaches, in smaller
or larger measures.
As CIOs begin refining their private
cloud deployments, they are gradually
realizing that the onus is now on them to
validate and justify not just the IT value
of efficiencies arising out of their CAPEX
investment in private cloud, but also the
direct business outcomes of the new way
of deploying IT.
The key cloud benefits that will
enable CIOs to deliver business value
to the organization are: 1) lowered
costs, 2) lowered barriers to entry into
new markets, 3) improved business
continuity and DR; 4) simplified IT and 5)
IT user empowerment. In an emerging
economy like India, large enterprises
are constantly looking to innovate and
enter new markets. On-demand delivery
of IT services through a cloud model can
vastly improve the time to market the
new initiatives. Whether it is utilizing
private cloud to deliver applications and
resources to customers and partners or
deploying collaboration applications on a
public cloud environment, there is plenty
of scope and potential for CIOs to expand
use cases of cloud computing to directly
benefit the enterprise business.
There are some local factors that
have the potential to significantly
accelerate the next phase of cloud
adoption in India. Indian CIOs need to
be cognizant of these factors and watch
out for indicators that will enable them
to plan their enterprise cloud strategies
better. The top three factors favoring
cloud adoption in India in the long
term are: 1) strong understanding of
existing deployments of virtualization
technologies, 2) Evolving cloud offerings
from India-based global service providers,
and 3) recruiting technically skilled
workforce that is competent in cutting
edge data center technologies.
CIOs in India can do well to leverage
the benefits of cloud computing to raise
the profile of the IT organization as an
indispensable influencer of business
outcomes. However, it would be prudent
for them to approach this paradigm with
tempered enthusiasm as there are still
technology, regulatory and standards
issues that need to be addressed for
cloud computing to become a seamless
part of their current IT infrastructure.
Gleaning best practices and learnings
from early adopter case studies (from
both emerging and mature markets)
and investing in technology stacks that
leave future scope for interoperability
(as opposed to getting locked in) are two
key areas that will lay the foundation for
a successful enterprise cloud computing
strategy in the coming years. n
Sid Deshpande is the Senior Research Analyst,
Data Center Systems, Gartner
www.informationweek.in
 practical analysis
Art Wittmann
Choosing SaaS Apps is IT’s work
LOB partners IT pros will now have to deal with the fact
that business-side partners have a variety
tend to fall in of new technology choices and avenues. If
love with an accounts payable wants a different expense-
reporting system, lots of software-as-a-
app’s interface service alternatives are available; same goes
and functionality, for human resources, sales, and most other
parts of the organization. For most CIOs and
but they don’t CFOs, this “competition” is a welcome relief.
know enough Tactical applications can be taken off IT’s
to-do list, and overall costs can be lowered —
about things they’ll no doubt appear lower at first, at least.
like integration While the budgeting process and even the
and user application selection process may change,
one thing that shouldn’t change much is IT’s
authentication role in selecting apps. Whether an application
is SaaS-based and will run with little day-to-
day maintenance from IT, or it’s to be run on
your company’s internal infrastructure and
therefore will be the sole responsibility of IT,
it’s the job of IT leaders to ensure that every
widely used application meets the needs it
was envisioned to meet.
The biggest challenge in this regard is
ensuring that SaaS apps meet your corporate
standards for everything from the stability
of the vendor and the security of your data
to the quality of the contract — service-
level agreement guarantees and penalties
provisions. Conversely, it’s easy for line-
of-business partners to fall in love with an
application’s functionality and user interface,
but they typically won’t know enough
about other important aspects, like how
user authentication will work and whether
the necessary hooks are there for data
integration with other applications.
This is a lesson a lot of IT teams have
already learned the hard way yet many forget
today. When you didn’t have standards in
place for a personal productivity app, for
example, users bought some from Lotus,
some from Microsoft, and some from
companies long since out of business — and
the result was a support nightmare. For
years, database standards have been tough
to enforce, and even operating systems crept
into the organization because of specific app
and project requirements. We risk repeating
that lack of discipline as IT either abdicates
the application decision to LOB leaders or
comes into the process too late in the game.
Whether 25 years ago or today, the result
is the same: Short-term benefits eventually
give way to support and integration problems
that often far outstrip the savings or end
user benefits initially realized. Buyers must
look at the whole picture, and end users and
business-side partners just don’t have that
complete view. You do.
Whether IT will play its critical role in
selecting SaaS applications depends on its
relationship with management and business-
side partners. If you’ve run an insular IT
organization, one that avoids talking and
working with business-side partners, those
partners will be only too happy to throw
their chosen SaaS applications over that
wall you’ve built and expect you to run them.
Grumble all you want; you’ve given them no
reason to act another way. Similarly, if your
corner-office masters are convinced they’re
better at picking application partners than
you are, then yours is an uphill battle. It may
take some failures and your wholehearted
efforts to make the best of poor choices to
develop a better working relationship.
Whatever it takes, IT must take full
ownership of SaaS applications. It’s not just
good for IT; it’s good for your company. n
Source: InformationWeek, USA
Art Wittmann is Director of InformationWeek Analytics, a
portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports.
You can write to him at awittmann@techweb.com.
march 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 69
 down to business
Rob Preston
In defense of the
IT introverts
Despite the A forthcoming research study conveys
a mixed message about the leadership
conventional capabilities of introverts, along the standard
wisdom, bearers of the IT profession—at least
according to the industry’s oldest stereotype.
extravert An October 4 Harvard Business Review
qualities aren’t article on the study effectively damns
introverts with faint praise, as if they’re an
always the stuff odd but plucky bunch of overachievers.
of leadership, The study, due to be published next year,
and introvert was conducted by the Harvard Business
School’s Francesca Gino, the Wharton
qualities School’s Adam M. Grant, and the UNC Kenan-
aren’t just Flagler Business School’s David A. Hofmann.
Introverts can make for productive leaders,
shortcomings the study acknowledges, but they’re more
that must be likely to succeed when they’re surrounded by
extraverts and more likely to fail when they’re
overcome surrounded by other introverts. Conversely,
the study finds that extraverted leaders
are more likely to succeed with introverted
employees and less likely with extraverted
employees.
It sounds like an interesting study, and
you can read about it here. But allow me
to take issue with the way introversion is
conveyed in the HBR article, as well as poke
at the broader IT stereotype.
What I find a little simplistic about the
study—or at least the HBR’s characterization
of it—is the implicit assumption that extravert
qualities are the stuff of leadership while
introvert qualities are shortcomings that
need to be overcome. Extraverts are
portrayed as go-getters — they’re bold,
collaborative, energetic, and adventurous.
Introverts are portrayed as passive — they’re
quiet, shy, reserved, and unadventurous.
Despite stating that both types of leaders
“can be equally successful or ineffectual,” the
HBR article seems to overlook the fact that
extraverted leaders could be blowhards, rash
decision makers, and shallow glad-handers,
while introverts could be natural leaders—
calculating strategists.
We should look at extraverts and
70 i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k ma rc h 2 0 1 1
introverts the way the Myers Briggs
personality evaluators do. The Myers Briggs
definitions have less to do with active vs.
passive and more to do with how individuals
draw their energy and inspiration — extraverts
seek out and process information from other
people; introverts tend to sort things out
on their own. By those definitions, for every
successful extraverted leader (Steve Ballmer,
John Chambers, Marc Benioff) there’s a
successful introverted one (Michael Dell, Eric
Schmidt, Jim Goodnight). Who’s to say which
style is “better”? I’m sure extraverted leaders
must work at their listening and deliberation
skills, just as introverted leaders must work
at public speaking and team building.
InformationWeek has the privilege of
engaging regularly with an editorial advisory
board of world-class CIOs. At a recent board
dinner, I was struck by the eclectic mix of
personality types. The extraverts weren’t the
only alpha leaders in the room. In fact, the
advisory board member with the most acute
E.F. Hutton quality (when he talks, people
listen) was Hewlett-Packard CIO Randy Mott,
whose quiet, unassuming command and
charisma are apparent to all, and whose
record of leadership and accomplishment at
HP—and before that, at Dell and Wal-Mart — is
exemplary.
Corporate leadership is about driving
innovation and profitable execution, as well
as creating an environment so that your
people want to break down doors for you and
your department or company. Since there’s
next to zero chance that all-extravert teams
will be led by introverts and vice versa, it’s
time we valued an assortment of personality
types and worked on drawing out the most
productive attributes. n
Source: InformationWeek, USA
Rob Preston is VP and Editor in Chief of InformationWeek.
You can write to Rob at rpreston@techweb.com.
www.informationweek.in