'Implement the right technology'

With so many new technologies available in the market, which is the right technology for your own optimization is going to be a major challenge

Each day new technology floods the market. So which is the right technology for your own optimization and what is the right time to invest is going to the major challenges ahead, says N. Kailsanathan, Vice-President & CIO of Titan Group. In an interview with Manu Sharma of CIOL Bureau, spoke on some of his major accomplishments as a CIO to what he would like to hear from the vendors in the coming fiscal.

CIOL: There has been a lot of noise on IT spending and breakthrough implementations? How much of this mere tom-tomming and how much of this makes an impact on the ground?
KN: I would not like to term it as breakthrough. IT has improved the processes and simplified them to make things more robust and reliable. Innovations happen the way IT is managed.

CIOL: A lot of organizations link IT budget with the company's growth? What do you have to say about it?KN: Can you say that by investing in an ERP your turnover will grow? But what will happen is your ability to analyze the data will become much better. Certain areas like supply chain, we also have to link directly with the alignment in the field.

CIOL: What are some of the challenges faced by you as a CIO?
KN: Getting more and more money out of the system by investing in IT is a major challenge. Once you have set up the base like ERP, Planning, Networking in order, getting funds to upgrade the system is another challenge. Management asks why do you need to upgrade when things are running smoothly?
Security is another big thing that needs constant upgradation but getting funds again and again is not easy.

CIOL: Does your enterprise consider spending money on the latest IT implementation as a burden or do they feel it is an investment and mandatory for any organization?
KN: Long term investment can create a problem but now every one looks at investment with quick returns.

CIOL: Can you site any specific area where IT has come as an accomplishment in your stint as a CIO?
KN: We have done some advanced planning and optimization of a software, that has really helped the business. It was optimization of not only the products but also the deliveries.

CIOL: What would you like to hear from the vendors during the next fiscal?
KN: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is going forward will play a major role in the way you integrate the system. A lot of integration is through home grown applications they will come under a standard platform of SOA.
Since a lot is happening on the retailing front, a lot of technologies will come into the market like RFID. Besides CRM is another major area to identify the customers' needs.

CIOL: What has your organization doing on the IT green front?
KN: Our organization is not a major consumer of power but what every one is talking about today is how to save on electricity. Green technology is a very big subject from green buildings to green computers and a lot of works needs to be done.

CIOL: What are the challenges you foresee during the coming years?
KN: More challenges are about running the business than IT. When things begin to work well, getting funds for improving/enhancing is a major challenge. Security is another challenge since it is a perennial problem.
Implementing new technologies at the right time is another challenge. But since all technologies don't work and you have to be very careful about the products that are flooding the market.

Indian BPO industry to reach $50 bn by 2012?

A joint study conducted by National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) and the Everest Group, a global strategy consulting firm reveals that the $11 billion Indian BPO industry in its current momentum is poised to touch $30 billion by 2012. However, with accelerated growth to capture the addressable spend in the international and domestic market could take the industry to $50 billion by 2012. Som Mittal, president of Nasscom spoke to Manu Sharma of CIOL Bureau on how the Indian BPO industry is shaping up.

CIOL: What was this study all about?
Som Mittal: The Nasscon-Everest India BPO study began in August 2007 to provide a comprehensive fact-based view of capabilities of sector, opportunities and growth imperatives for Indian BPO industry and its stakeholders. We found that the Indian BPO sector has evolved tremendously since its inception, not only in its size but also in terms of maturity - service lines, service delivery capability and footprint.

CIOL: Does India's BPO have the potential to touch the $50 billion mark?
SM: I strongly feel that the aspired target for the BPO industry is very much achievable however stakeholders will need to act on a number of initiatives to accelerate growth individually as well as collectively.

CIOL: What are the steps needed by the industry/government to achieve the $50 billion mark?
SM: The study highlights an eight point action themes for the Indian BPO industry to realize its potential and accelerate its growth. We will share the study with the industry and also the various governments. Some of the themes include: Protect India's cost advantage to ensure buyer interest; Create BPO hubs to drive this industry deeper within India; Increase employment and access untapped talent pools by creating greater linkages between the current education system and the needs of the BPO industry and Facilitating the development of BPO-specific education models.

CIOL: How will the BPO growth impacted the Indian economy?
SM: The five-fold growth in the Indian BPO market will bring huge payoffs to India's economy and employment. It contributes about 2.5 percent to India's GDP from export earnings and provides employment to over 2 million people that is expected to grow by 2-3 times. Besides growth in tier 2 and tier 3 cities and towns will see a six-fold growth in the number of delivery centers.

CIOL: In terms of employment where does it stand today?
SM: This US$ 11 billion industry today employs more that 700,000 people across 25 countries and accounts for approximately 40 percent of the global BPO offshore market thereby creating huge job opportunities and impacting the economy.

CIOL: Has the industry been able to penetrate into smaller towns across India?
SM: The industry has today expanded to tier 2 and tier 3 cities and towns and delivers services from over 30 cities with in India. In addition, the industry has acquiring global services delivery footprint with operations in over 75 cities across 25 countries.

CIOL: How has the BPO industry growth over the years?
SM: India has emerged as the destination of choice for offshore delivery of business processes. Today the BPO industry has touched $11 billion and growing annually at 35 percent over the past last five years. Earlier the IT industry involved only the engineers and technical people but now the fresh graduates are entering this industry.

CIOL: What are the areas of potential growth in this industry?
SM: About 30 percent of the opportunity will be in the under-penetrated industries such as telecom, retail, media and energy and so it is needless to say that the traditionally large areas such as banking, insurance, financial services and manufacturing will offer large opportunities as well. Today North America continues to be the largest BPO market for India. However, untapped opportunities in UK, Continental Europe and Asia-Pacific will offer larger outsourced opportunities as well.

CIOL: What is the Future of BPO industry in India?
SM: Our figures indicate that the global BPO industry is estimated at about $250-$280 billion. But presently only less than 4-5 percent of the industry is actually tapped. But we see a huge potential in the future in terms of growth and also employment in India.

Lawson to make a dent in the Indian ERP market

Lawson Software, the Minnesota-based third largest ERP company has entered the Indian market as part of the strategy to attract regional partners to serve customers.

According to a Gartner reports, India's ERP market is pegged at $143 million and is growing at 14-15 percent on a yearly basis. With more companies emerging in the infrastructure space, Lawson has opened an office in New Delhi to expand in the region. It has also appointed Kamal Sharma as its regional head for Lawson South Asia.

Talking to CIOL, Harry Debes, president & CEO of Lawson Software said, "we were predominantly a US-based company but have gone global since and have presence in about 33 countries. We see huge opportunities in India and other BRIC countries and expect to grow at a steady pace."

The company is already serving customers in India and Sri Lanka through partnerships with Symphony Services and ETP International and plans to draw on the expertise of more local partners and provide sales and marketing support via its India office.

"Even though ERP major Lawson opens India office have had their presence in India for several years, still we are sure of gaining a sizeable market share in the coming years through our partnership," remarks Debes.

In fact, the company entered India way back in 1994 and has about 25 customers existing in India and hopes to now focus on the mid-level customers. "Walmart, the leading global retail giants is one of Lawson's big corporate customers, so not necessarily targeting only on mid-sized or big corporates but will remain focused on new companies in fashion, F&B, healthcare, public sector verticals in India," says Sharma.

But on specific verticals like the healthcare segment where in Lawson claims to have about a 60 percent market share in the USA, the company is looking for active partners in the healthcare industry mainly for back office. Likewise, it has already signed up with ITC, Reliance Retail, PTEX in the fashion and garment vertical and KPIT Cummins in the equipment service and retail segments. It also has TBA in the food & beverages (F&B), Symphony in the distribution & manufacturing and likely to enter in the other segments also shortly.

The company plans to employ four initially at its Delhi office and grow over the years. On the global front, the company is expected to grow its headcount by 15 percent in 2008.

Lawson currently has offices in China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and also in Thailand.

Opt for better technology to stay agile

Syntel has joined hands with Relativity Technologies for the modernizeation workbench platform to deliver enhanced system transparency and business efficiency.

Syntel Inc., a global information technology services and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) company, has selected Relativity Technologies' Modernization Workbench platform to support its rapidly growing application maintenance and migration practices.

Market pressures demand that companies stay agile in the face of an increasingly competitive global economy, but many core application portfolios are inflexible and inefficient, which hampers an organization's ability to adapt. A successful modernization effort requires first gathering a great deal of intelligence on the application portfolio.

A recent report by Forrester noted that "emerging application management disciplines such as application portfolio management (APM), application dependency mapping (ADM), and other portfolio disciplines are changing the way CIOs think about applications under maintenance and all work done in IT." The report continued, stating that "…increasingly, corporate management is tapping information to help distinguish the applications that should be kept and modernized from those that must be replaced and retired."

In order to help its customers make these difficult decisions, Syntel has integrated Relativity Technologies' Modernization Workbench into its Application Maintenance and Migration Centers of Excellence.

The Modernization Workbench is a market-leading suite of applications that analyzes a diverse array of legacy mainframe, mid-range and distributed applications and captures application data and business rules in a centralized repository. It generates rich technical and business intelligence about clients' application portfolios, which can be used to gain an insight into how well an organization's systems align with their business goals, enhancing Syntel's ability to deliver efficiency to clients' core business processes.

Syntel has successfully migrated the core operations of numerous Fortune 500 companies to more efficient architectures, and the Modernization Workbench promises to accelerate future initiatives by discovering, isolating, and reusingmission-critical business processes within a service-oriented architecture.

"We believe enterprises today understand that a legacy modernization strategy is crucial for maximizing the value of their investment. Application modernization can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership and align IT investments with business imperatives," said Keshav Murugesh, Syntel President and COO.

"After an intense, ROI-focused evaluation, we decided to standardize our migration framework on the Modernization Workbench. Syntel is pleased to partner with Relativity Technologies, and we look forward to expanding our deployment of this technology," said Murugesh.

"Syntel's adoption of the Modernization Workbench is a major validation of our technology," said Steve Maysonave, Chairman, President, and CEO of Relativity Technologies. "Our combined solution amounts to business intelligence for application portfolios, and enables outsourcers and clients to collaboratively address core business challenges. The result is an application warehouse that improves IT governance, efficiency and alignment with strategic goals like agility, security, and regulatory compliance."

Juniper expands R&D staff based in India

The company is planning to invest $400 million in next five years mainly for R&D activities and also add 300 more staff by mid 2008 in India.

Out of the total global strength of about 3,500 R&D workforce in Juniper Networks, close to 30 percent of the engineering workforce will be based in India doing research across all the product line. Now with India among the fastest-growing region in Asia pacific, the networking equipment major plans to invest $400 million in next five years in India mainly for R&D activities.

Talking to CIOL, Hitesh Sheth, executive vice-president & general manager of Ethernet Platform Business Group of Juniper Networks says, "India has the largest workforce for research & development globally and we are very bullish about it. Juniper has some major contribution from the R&D centre in Bangalore and plans to add 300 more R&D and operations staff by mid 2008 in India." In fact, since the strength of the team is expanding rapidly and will touch 1000 in India now, we are also expanding on our office premises here at the Bagmane Tech Park in Bangalore, he adds.

Juniper has major centers across the globe, headquartered in of San Jose, the company has other R&D centres in Westford in Massachusetts, Beijing, Canada, Israel and Bangalore, where the teams works in a matrix environment, says Sheth.

Lately the IT network infrastructure solution provider has increased its level of contribution towards evolution of global products for the company. In fact, the Bangalore R&D centre is engaged in developing networking platforms, routers and security products, switches and JNOS, the operating system. The centre has also developed fully-owned products.

Recently, Juniper unveiled its new high-performance network infrastructure offerings with a new family of Ethernet switches (EX series). "The team is now focused on completing the terabit-chassis EX switch, and further enhancing the fixed-configuration and virtual-chassis products. The Bangalore R&D team's contribution in the past and the recent success has prompted the company to hand over critical projects," he noted.

Narendra Venkaswamy, managing director of India & SAARC at Juniper Networks, Bangalore says, "the company will invest in research, engineering, switching products, security products. Globally our switching portfolio is largely focused here and we are also growing our sales team in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and other cities."

The company is focused on Internet protocol (IP) solutions market in India and it is expecting major market opportunities with telecom service providers rolling out their network infrastructure. Juniper India has around 1,250 employees and has invested $200 million in the last three years.

Juniper is also seeing major opportunity in the area of 3G equipment and infrastructure mainly routers, switches, WAN acceleration and security products to major service providers.
Reacting to the future of Juniper in India, Venkaswamy says the company has a $2.8 billion turnover for the year 2007 with Asia-Pacific contributing 23 percent. Besides telecom, Juniper India is also focusing on the segments of government, BFSI, IT and manufacturing.

"3G is one of the areas that has given us great growth in other parts of Asia. The future in 3G drives switching which drives routing and security. We are partnering with all major tier 1 service providers in India, who will be rolling out their 3G networks," says Sheth.

Troubled times for tech?

It seems to be a very shaky state of affairs for the global economy and technology in the high-tech industry. What worried economists six months ago, is having them in an outright panic with "economic rescue" plan that may be on the brink of a depression. A depression? That may be pushing it. But if you believe this has little to do with the tech industry, think again. That mess on Wall Street means it's hard to get credit--whether if you're a giant company looking to make capital expenditures like new server station, or a start-up looking to buy office furniture or put money down for rent. Wall Street has always been a cutting-edge technology buyer, and that spigot is all but shut off for now. Enterprises are announcing plans to trim or freeze spending, and private customers probably aren't far behind.
On top of that, venture capital spending is on shaky ground, mergers and acquisitions in tech are down, and successful initial public offerings on the stock market are as unlikely as they have been at any point since the dot-com bust. What more, after witnessing a steady increase in billing rates for the last few years, Indian IT service providers could face pressure on the pricing front as demand slows down amidst worsening financial crisis in the US, the largest service market.
Already, we're starting to see signs of growing problems. Rumors are spreading of growing layoffs in Silicon Valley that is already having a global affect, and since the third quarter just ended, it's a good bet that surprising earnings shortfalls could be the big news in the coming days.
Nonetheless, while many may fear a replay of the dot-com bust, what could happen to the tech industry over the next year will be different for a combination of reasons: This isn't a self-made disaster, there's not as much public money on the table, and the rate of spending for Web 2.0 companies has been relatively modest when compared to the wild gold rush days of the late 1990s.
Some analysts feel that the US financial crisis will impact in India after December. IT Secretary Ashok Kumar Manoli said that about 35 per cent of revenue of major IT industries comes from Banking Service Finance Institutions world over, with banks in the US having a major share. "It is too early to say about the impact of the crisis on this."

APAC big market for collaboration tools: Cisco

New Collaboration Portfolio

The new collaboration portfolio is designed to help companies accelerate business processes, increase productivity and speed innovation With the global recession having a major impact on the US companies, Cisco, the leaders in routers and switches sees a high growth in the Asia-Pacific region for the new collaboration portfolio that helps companies accelerate business processes, increase productivity and speed innovation.

Targeting the current $34 billion global market for what are called collaboration products, Cisco said it will target users, particularly on the move, delivering the applications across platforms like Windows, Mac OS, and even mobile phones running on Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows OS. The market for such tools and services is projected to grow to $48 billion by 2011.
Reports indicate that it is slated as the fastest growing advanced technology in Cisco's product portfolio. The new collaboration portfolio is now looking at emerging countries in Asia like India, China, Middle East, Russia, South Africa as high growth markets. The company has initially rolled out 40 products and 800 capabilities that are very significant for the Indian market.

Talking to CIOL, Manjula Talreja, VP, strategy & business operations, software group, Cisco said, "even though the foundation for this product was laid in the US and so has about 70 percent market share, still more than 30 percent comes from the emerging markets spread across Asia-Pac, Africa, South America. But in the coming years it is likely that it will become a 50:50 ration."

The US slowdown could help increase the numbers in the emerging markets to achieve this target sooner, says Talreja.

The networking giant said the new set of tools would enable enterprises and executives to work across platforms and devices seamlessly wherever they are.

The company is tapping on companies in particular verticals like IT, ITES, manufacturing, government, services, retail and heathcare for deployment these advanced technologies.
The new set of tools comprising Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Connect, are designed to integrate with existing IT infrastructure, web services and business application to allow users customise applications and services.

The new set of collaboration products use the network as a platform to inter-operate with business applications, communication devices and web-based tools.

"Cisco collaboration strategy is a fusion of unified communication technology, video, telepresence and web 2.0 technologies that will accelerate business processes and speed up innovation," said Ranajoy Punja, VP, business development advanced technologies, Cisco India, SAARC.

The acquisition of the Santa Clara-based WebEx Communication Inc followed by and calendaring company PostPath Inc and IM firm Jabber Inc helped Cisco roll out the current products.
"Collaboration is the next phase of Internet and the centre of this phase is the network. Our network platform uses open-standards protocols to expose critical collaboration services like instant messaging," said Don Proctor, senior VP, software group, Cisco.

He said the portfolio will use this network architecture to create an integrated collaboration experience that has everything from simple text messaging to Cisco TelePresence sessions.