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� | January 31, 2012 visit www.dqindia.com DATAQUEST | A CyberMedia Publication

Januay 31, 2012Contents

Let’s Reach, to TeachIndia has the largest illiterate population in the world, a truth that mars our celebration of the exponential growth that we have registered in many sectors. Can ICt help reach, and teach this number?

ICT In EduCaTIon

14

A Dose of IT for India’s Healthcare Bringing the poor into the healthcare system poses a big challenge. But an integrated approach and adequate dose of It can cure the ailments

It is high time for stakeholders from technology, telecom, and banking

sectors to start working together in order to achieve financial inclusion

in a certain timeframe

Creating Disruptive Changes

CoVER SToRYCoVER SToRY

ICT for Nation Building

India needs to have an integrated approach for leveraging technology to create better access to education, healthcare, and financial services. And the solutions have to be sustainable

18

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Afterthought ...................................................98

REGULARS48|

SpEciAL REpoRtCrystal Gazing 2012

40| Unified communications: Healthcare’s New Aid Healthcare organizations are looking up to unified communications to improve healthcare delivery, employee productivity, and work-team collaboration through planned and cost-effective implementation

44| it in Healthcare: creating a Global Benchmark To bridge the yawning gap between India and Bharat, especially in healthcare, the government needs to infuse confidence by technology innovations, outsourcing, availability of human capital, etc

46| cloud computing: Are You Ready? Cloud adoption in the pharmaceutical industry is witnessing growth despite the riders attached

60| cyber Security: Quarantining cyber Space Deliberate attacks on the cyber space of government bodies has brought forth a new dimension of political rivalry and war between nations

62| it Strategy: Becoming a tech Led Enterprise Despite major breakthroughs in technology and large sums being spent on IT, CEOs are still not convinced about the value. Here’s how that can be done

68| cloud computing: trusting the cloud Though cloud computing holds great promise, organizations should exercise extreme caution before embracing it especially from security, compliance, and legal points of view

92| Spotlight: Why Lokpal Should be a computer? We can have eminent people in the panel, but they should play the role of rule-makers, not investigators

93| Books: Dataquest Reading List of 2011 Books If you have not read them already, pick them up now

94| DQ Snippets: incredible india!

95| top 7 Happenings in 2011: Kolaveri et al... Social media has danced beautifully to the tunes of vibrant happenings in the country throughout 2011

96| MSN poll 2011: the Best and Worst of 2011 The year-ending poll held by MSN India saw leading personalities from all walks of life firmly getting rooted in the minds of many Indians

LEISuRE

Come 2012, sBUs and sMes too are expected to invest heavily on cloud, saas, and mobility using specialist help who leverage emerging platforms, tools, and technologies

74| Spotlight: ‘Smart’ initiative IBM has initiated an educational program to cater to the increasing talent and skilled manpower requirement in the field of analytics

76| Spotlight: Hard times The monsoon flooding in Thailand that closed down a dozen or more hard drive manufacturing and supply plants, has caused around 40% shortage in demand globally

78| Mobile oS: oS is the King The Mobile OS market is getting polarized on innovation, apps user experience, and seamless communication and entertainment features

� | August 31, 2011 For more on India’s IT industry, visit www.dqindia.com| DATAQUEST | A CyberMedia Publication

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z 20 Hot E-commerce Start-upsz Tale of 20 E-tailers: Dataquest List of 20 Hottest E-commerce Start-ups in Indiaz DQ CMR Top T Schools Survey 2011z DQ CMR Best Employer Survey 2011z Status of E-gov Projectsz BITS Pilani: Raising the Bar (DQ-CMR T Schools) z The Second Coming of E-commercez IIIT Hyderabad: Sustained Performance (DQ-CMR T Schools) z Financial Inclusion: Reaching the Unreachedz CSA 2011z Is Social Networking a Boon or Bane for Teenagers?z Are You Ready for a Social Media Policy?z Outsourcing Deals 2011: No Stoppingz Cloud Service Brokerage is the new Buzz in IT Townz Cloud Computing: The Why, What, When and Howz BPO ESAT: A Game of Equalsz Cloud Computing: A Magic Wand to Enhance Efficiency of IT Deptz Illegal Recycling: Another Danger in India’s E-waste storyz Look Ma, No Cloud: The Enterprise is tied down by legacyz Top 20 Articles of 2010

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Vol XXX No 2 January 31, 2012

Indian IT poster boy NR Narayana Murthy angered and put off quite a few of us when he recently commented on the quality of students passing out from IITs, and their employability. But I think he showed courage in throwing open a subject, which has been on the mind of a lot of us, for debate. Narayana Murthy does not shoot from the hip. I am sure there are enough reasons for him to get

worried about our jewels of the crown. Some of us might argue that he is interested in better workers for the software

factories to sell services overseas, but that, to my mind, is a very short sighted and negative view of things. The big benefit of better output from our colleges and universities will actually go to India and Indians.

Both in IT and telecom, we seem to be heading for a slowdown. This is not due to market saturation, but because of lack of innovation in our approach. For instance, IT deployment at enterprise level, is still slow and poor in smaller cities and towns. Visit any budget hotel or a small retail store in Delhi, and you will see lots of IT being used. Go to even a mid-sized hotel or retail outlet in a town like Kanpur, and you will hardly find any IT. Thank the students, entrepreneurs, and homes buying laptops and desktops in places like Kanpur, that keeps tier-2, -3 and -4 towns going. Similarly, the tele-density in metros and big cities in India is about 80% compared to over 20% in rural areas. The challenge clearly is in taking the next leap.

On a recent visit to IIM Ahmedabad, I discovered (or am I poorly informed?) that there is a center of excellence there set up in collaboration with Idea Telecom. These guys are doing some very insightful and innovative work, and brimming with fresh ideas. I believe it is these future ICT managers who will bring about the approach change that is desperately needed to move to the next growth orbit. And that will not happen unless we review our education systems, even in haloed places like the IIMs and IITs.

While experts can sit together with the industry and academia and chart out a long term plan, one area, which I think is a universally accepted solution and is known to give quick results, is closer industry-academia working. India has educational institutes that have been around for decades, and the ICT industry has also been around for at least 25 years, but there is hardly any industry-academia collaboration to talk about. We need a lot more of this to happen.

It might not be very easy though. I was told by the head of a smaller technology institute that big companies are only looking for “famous colleges” to collaborate, and are very reluctant to work with smaller and relatively lesser known colleges. There is no dearth of talent in tier-2 and -3 colleges. Mr Narayana Murthy will have to convince his peers to change this attitude. On the other hand a recent survey has indicated that jobs abroad and in MNCs is the first choice of tech and business students, and young professionals. Professors will need to convince their students that learnings, growth opportunities and satisfaction are far higher in jobs where they can be part of making the second wave come true.

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SEnD yoUr fEEDbAck for US To SErvE yoU bETTEr...

The Government’s Courtship with Social MediaThis is with reference to your cover story ‘The Government’s Court-ship with Social Media’ (Dataquest, November 30, 2011). I just want to let you know that even ‘Pune Traffic Police’ is on Facebook and has been posting many updates in Marathi lan-guage. Link to this page: https://www.facebook.com/punetraffic. And, your article was very nice.

Suraj Deshmukh, Pune

Aadharless in 2012Read your interesting editorial ‘Aad-harless in 2012’ (Dataquest, January 15, 2012). Here are my few observa-tions about Aadhar:

n Too much is being read into the Standing Committee Report on Aadhar. The project, ambitious and gigantic, is flawed on many counts. The Standing Committee has done its job of asking some key questions. Hence a parliamentary scrutiny is a must, which will add to the sanctity of the Aadhaar framework.

n Planning Commission has to just clarify various issues raised by the Parliamentary Committee and if con-vinced, the bill will get approved.

n Aadhar was conceived to provide IDs to people who don’t have it,

JAN

UARY

15, 2012

particularly to people in the rural areas and urban migrants. People who already have some sort of document such as a passport, voter ID card, or driving license don’t really need it. In fact, giving Aadhar card at this stage is a waste of public resources.

n Aadhar will be useful to most citizens only if there is a statutory approval for it from the Parliament and recognition from the govern-ment agencies. Even here it serves a limited purpose, because identity is just one of the two key parameters required for any key transaction in our country. Address proof is the second and an equally important part, which is not served by the Aadhar project. A passport or voter ID is better as it combines both these functions.

n The security and sanctity of data collected has not been ex-plained fully. All students in my daughter’s school were enrolled in August. This is one of Bengaluru’s premium school. Despite entering the data from her passport, the data entry errors made were too many. Where is the scope for correction? One can now imagine the validity of the data for 600 mn people likely to be cov-ered in the first phase. Although she was given an acknowledgment slip, however nothing further has been heard from the Aadhar unit, even after 5 months.

I am not even getting into various other aspects of the project at this stage, which needs a review.

N Suresh via Emailgroup editor, BioSpectrum

Corrigendumn This is with reference to

article ‘Second Innings: The Ecosystem’s Getting Ready’ (Da-taquest, December 31, 2011). It should read as Aparna Ballakur of Yahoo! in India on Page 26, 27 and as Srimathi Shivashankar of HCL Technologies on page 29.

n This is with reference to the news of AB SCIEX India (Dataquest, December 15, 2011). It should read as, AB SCIEX has acquired Labindia, on page 103.Errors are regretted—Ed

DQ Top 20I undertake research at the University of Manchester on India’s IT indus-try. I use Dataquest statistics as the key source for my work. In all recent years, the DQ Top 20 includes an overview of the stats, which enables one to understand the big picture.

Thanks for coming out with such surveys!

Richard Heeks, director, centre for development informatics, IDPM, SED,

University of Manchester, Manchester UK

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ganesha


2012—Traditions To Opportunity The Indian IT sector in 2012 must continue to demonstrate the maturity of a market leader and secure the forts that have made us the destination of choice for all global majors

DR GANESH NATARAJAN

Readers of this column will indulge me if I use the first article this year to dwell on some traditions that all of us associated with the industry itself can be proud of. In an environment of great change that

all of us are going through, as the global economic situation continues to look bleak and the Indian social political and economic outlook gives little cause for complacency, every individual, organization and the Indian IT and BPO industry will be tested in 2012 to demonstrate the mettle it is made of. In such an environment, the old traditions of success in the face of adversity and the quest for new opportunities in an environment of slowdown is what will see us prevail.

Fortunately we have a lot going for us. During the last ten years, the Software Exports sector has mitigated service and geography concentration risks, built robust service offerings in a range of IT, BPO, Infrastructure Management, and Engineering services and moved up the value chain to offer consulting led solutions to a discerning customer base all over the world. In the domestic market as well, as Indian manufacturing and financial services firms have sprouted wings and become global in their own right, the need to improve IT intensity levels to international levels has opened up substantial project opportunities for the IT providers. The industry has new opportunities sprouting everywhere, be it the scale offered by Engineering Services and R&D outsourcing, the newly confident product development companies and the unclaimed ground that cloud computing, mobility, social media and green IT offers to all incumbents as well as new players.

In this environment of challenge and opportunity, successful incumbents both in the domestic and

exports segments would be well advised to stick to the traditional strengths of customer focus, process capability and innovation that have got us so far. To use a cricketing metaphor, the virtues of maintaining line and length are always greater than the exploitation of a batsman’s weakness against a short-pitched bouncer and the Indian IT sector in 2012 must continue to demonstrate the maturity of a market leader and secure the forts in applications and infrastructure management, transaction processing and end-to-end IT and BPO outsourcing capabilities that has made us the destination of choice for all global majors.

For individual firms too, building a strong foundation on traditional strengths and using this base to reach out and offer new solutions to existing and new customers will be the priority and for every individual in the industry, continuous learning and innovation should be the watchwords.

This magazine too has been a lighthouse for the industry for many a year providing new ideas and celebrating and rewarding success. For me personally, the completion of a dozen years of this column is an indication of the value Dataquest places on continuity in the midst of great change. Let 2012 be the year when every entity associated with this global industry reaffirms its commitment to maintaining the tradition of excellence in execution and market dominance!

“Every individual, organization and the Indian IT and BPO industry will be tested in 2012 to demonstrate the mettle it is made of”

The author is CEO of Zensar Technologies and co-chair of the National Knowledge Council of the CII. He can be reached at [email protected]

DR GANESH NATARAJAN

Cover Story


ICT for Nation BuildingIndia needs to have an integrated approach for leveraging technology to create better access to education, healthcare, and financial services. And the solutions have to be sustainable

Use of ICT for development is not a new idea. While the instances of ICT being deployed for improving public services is as old as ICT itself, of late, there have been a lot of coordinated global efforts around this. Ever since the global community agreed on the Millennium Development Goals—where

both access to certain basic healthcare and education feature prominently—there has been international discussions, symposia, and programs around how ICT can be lever-aged effectively to achieve these goals.

When it comes to implementation, however, countries have their own unique chal-lenges and have to figure out the unique ways of meeting those challenges. Those become extremely complex for a country like India, which does not just have a huge population but is also geographically, linguistically, and culturally diverse. What works perfectly at one place may be a non-starter at another. Also, the fact that it’s a democracy, means it’s almost impossible for the government to do anything without first having a broader consensus.

But Why this ICT-D?Though by and large the world has moved from why to how in ICT for Development (ICT-D), there are certain reasons (whys) that make India’s success in leveraging ICT to provide better healthcare, education, and access to financial services important not just for India but for the entire world.

shyamanuja [email protected]

Onkar [email protected]

Cover Story

DATAQUEST | A CyberMedia Publication visit www.dqindia.com January 31, 2012 | 15

India is a microcosm of the entire developing world, whichever way you look at it—be it in its diversity or distribution of wealth. Arguably, no other country has India’s diversity. And, few have as many billionaires as well as so many people living be-low the poverty line. Most commer-cial enterprises seeking to tap the market opportunities in the emerging world have already started using India as a test bed of innovation because of this reason. The assump-tion is that what works in India has a higher chance of working anywhere else in the developing world. That assumption is true when it comes to the overall national development as well. What works in India would have a higher chance of succeeding elsewhere in the emerging countries. It becomes especially true in this area—ICT-D—given India’s strength in technology. The solutions to the developmental challenges found in India, to a great extent, can be exported to the rest of the developing world. That is a definite expectation from India’s experimentation.

While that may be a well-ac-knowledged expectation, what is less obvious about implication of India’s development for the world is the increasing importance that it will assume as a provider of global workforce. In the next 3 decades, India will have the largest surplus working-age population in the world. Surplus working-age population in a country or region is the total work-ing-age population minus that part of the population that is needed to serve the needs of the non-working-age population in that country or region.

The other countries that will have a fairly large surplus working-

age population are countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Congo, and Indonesia. None of these countries—with possible exception of Indonesia—are anywhere near ready to serve the needs of the rest of the world. So, the world will turn to India and Indians. That manpower needs development in healthcare and education, which are the basic needs.

India’s ChallengesSize, of course, is a big challenge before India. Any solution that one would find for a billion people would have to be complex. That is the reason why we have focused on only 3 basic needs. Two of them are of course most fundamental. The third—access to financial services in some form—is needed to make the other 2 successful.

Despite the availability of tech-nology manpower, significant spend-ing by the government, and some of the most successful implementations (in isolation) happening in India, by and large, India’s story has not been too impressive. The prime reason is the absence of a vision with an integrated strategy and a coherent action plan.

It’s not difficult to understand why creating a coherent plan is such a big challenge. In India’s fed-eral structure, healthcare is a state subject and education is a concur-rent subject with primary education being mostly handled by the states. Any plan designed at the center is rarely implemented appropriately in the states. Even among the 3 areas we have taken up, we have seen much better progress in access to financial services, known as finan-

cial inclusion, because it’s being directly driven by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and all banks have to follow suit. There is no such body in education or healthcare. The center can at best be an advisor and resource provider, but rarely the implementor. A better cooperation and a mission approach—as seen in some of the successful e-governance initiatives—will work better. But that requires that the states should see the benefit of it directly.

Another bottleneck has been the traditional government approach of trying to ‘improve’ than ‘innovate’. Most of the technologies applied to the existing systems and proc-esses are very archaic to get any real benefit out of the technology; or even if they become a little efficient, it is a painfully slow process. What we need is a disruptive approach. A dis-ruptive approach means a disruptive change. A disruptive change is rarely welcomed and the least so by the government. While one component of this—innovative thinking—is still there in some form, the gap lies in carrying forward those ideas. Some of the best success stories of disrup-tive changes have been where each stakeholder has seen benefits. The computerization of Railways Res-ervations in the late-’80s is an apt example. There are many more.

A disruptive approach does not just speed up processes, it makes possible things hitherto thought to be impossible. For example, earlier, communication was not reliable. So anything like a tele-education or tele-medicine was impossible to imagine. Take financial inclusion. For years, the government was talking about making banking accessible to all people. What it was doing was it was trying to build more branches. The advent of ATMs made most of the services accessible to people at all times. Initially, many ATMs oper-ated only in a branch and were open from 9 to 5. It is only after remote

Despite the availability of technology manpower, significant spending, and some of the most successful implementations, by and large, India’s story has not been too impressive

Cover Story


ATMs and 24/7 concept came that the real benefit of ATMs reached people. Finally, it’s the bold move by the RBI to allow agents or business correspondents that finally saw financial inclusion becoming a real-ity, though there are still miles to go.

Beyond the Present and ImmediateAnother peculiarity of India is that it is a young nation. So any solution that is found has to be worked out keeping in mind the future in mind and not just to address the immedi-ate need; ie, it has to be sustainable. This is in sharp contrast to the West, where the population is aging and the focus is on immediate quick fixes.

That should start from the ap-proach itself. For example, educa-tion should see significantly higher spending while certain areas within healthcare such as maternity care should see a higher investment. Not just that, the focus in healthcare should be on awareness, campaigns, child immunization as compared to just provision of better hospitals and doctors. Quality healthcare is impor-tant, but access and sustainability are more important. In financial services, employment linkage should be a priority.

Since most of the technology still comes from the West, we have to be extra careful about the applicability

Dataquest spoke to a cross section of individuals—those that are experts in the areas of education, healthcare, and financial services as well as those with a track record of creating technology solutions—to come out with some definite recommendations. The challenges, various approaches, and some definite recommendations are pre-sented in the next few pages—sep-arately for education, healthcare, and financial inclusion.

While our approach in educa-tion and healthcare is a more holistic, integrated approach—as at the national level, we are yet to see that approach emerging, in financial services, it is more of specific but isolated suggestions, as the basic framework is already in place.

of the solutions to India. While there is no point reinventing the wheel by trying to create basic technology and tools, solutions have to be worked out keeping the Indian condition in mind. And, they should have built-in sustainability.

Tne aspect of that sustainability is creating a healthy base of indigenous technology solutions. The idea is not to create technology for technology’s sake, but to ensure that the response time for creating a solution to a new challenge is faster and the imple-mentation time is quicker. One posi-tive fallout of this will also be better adaptations of solutions to different local conditions within India itself. That will also make the whole system more robust.

One manifestation of that is inte-grating identified areas—healthcare, education, and financial services going by the Dataquest recommenda-tion, and any other area identified by the government—to the technology course curriculum itself. Skill devel-opment should also be a parallel activity.

Given India’s demography, we have to not just create a solution to known problems but unknown ones as well. So, an equal emphasis should be given to create solutions as well as to create multiplier effects.

All these should be tracked cen-trally to measure the progress. n

Dataquest Recommendations

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Sheetal, an urchin girl of vagrant parents, climbs down daily to the rough Delhi-roads in the hope of making a few bucks for her parents by selling fake copies of bestsellers and magazines to the people in cars that stop by at the red signals. “Achhi kitab hai, saheb (It’s a good

book, sir)” she tells innumerable people in a day. But the line that spontane-ously comes out of her mouth hundred times a day hardly means anything to her, since she is an illiterate girl. And she is not alone.

Millions of Sheetals who form the urban slum and rural habitats are residing in the country, deprived of basic education and thus an opportunity to grow and contribute to the task of nation building. And the latest figures that the cen-sus gives us put us at the forefront of being the largest illiterate population on earth—a stigma, of course. But instead of throwing mud on the policy makers and the people associated, it is time to act swiftly and find ways to bring the

Let’s Reach, to TeachIndia has the largest illiterate population in the world, a truth that mars our celebration of the exponential growth that we have registered in many sectors. Can ICT help reach, and teach this number?


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largest chunk of the population into the education fold.

The country’s strength today is its technology, which, of late, has been on the radar for making the education sector efficient. Dataquest went to the experts and raised the issues on how to take education to the grassroot level. Which are the mediums within the technological purview that can make millions of Sheetals participate in the educa-tional process?

Of course, when Dataquest says that technology can bring huge chang-es into the Indian education system, it

is not revealing a gospel truth. Tech-nology is already in place, being used in many schools and at many levels to compete with even the best in the world, but it’s a pity that its circumfer-ence has not gone beyond the affluent schools. These schools boast of the best-in-class interactive whiteboards and communication tools. Also not to be overlooked are the green patches in the public sector schools where, to an extent, IT has made its inroads. But the miniscule scale and that the fact that they are just confined to cities, makes digital inclusion a herculean task.

Dreadful Dropout RatesThe foremost issue that the coun-try’s education system faces is of re-ducing the dropout rate in the class-rooms—a chronic fever which could not be cured since 1947. Currently the gross enrolment ratio in India is less than 15%. According to the Human Development Index (HDI) data published by United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in its 2011 version of the annual Human Development Index, India ranks 118th among 157 countries—below countries such as Lebanon, Tuni-sia, Palestine Territory, Namibia, Uganda, and Kenya.

This is despite the fact that ‘Right to Education’ is in place. “The gross enrolment in primary education drops drastically at the middle school, further at secondary and higher secondary schools, and is fairly abysmal at higher education levels. All efforts like RTE or mid-day meals can only succeed when the children come to schools,” says Irina Ghose, director, project Shik-sha, Microsoft India. India’s track record on this aspect is even worse. In the UNDP HDI based ranking, India ranks an abysmally low 148th among 192 countries.

Can information technology break barriers and devise a way through which the dropout rates drop drastically? “Fifteen percent gross enrolment ratio means that the majority of the young popula-tion drops out and does not make it to college. To serve the dropouts and the rest of the 74%, we need to ensure that the quality of instructors is high regardless of location. Infor-mation technology is thus invalu-able in breaking down geographical barriers and ensuring the uniformity of the standard of education across the nation,” says Santanu Paul, CEO, TalentSprint. In his view, if the traditionally deprived and backward sections receive the same kind of education through the more

“Information technology is invaluable in breaking down geographical barriers and ensuring uniformity of the standard of education across the nation”

Santanu Paul CEO, TalentSprint

“The gross enrolment in primary education drops drastically at the middle school, further at secondary and higher secondary schools, and is fairly abysmal at higher education levels”Irina Ghose director, project Shiksha, Microsoft India

“My belief is that it is not rocket science to deploy technology even in rural schools. It can help change the mindset of the people and encourage them to focus also on female literacy”Veena Raizada head, academics, Next Education

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advanced centers in India, it will go a long way in creating a more equal India. He also argues that Indian government has traditionally concentrated investment in univer-sity education only. Even with the recent enforcement of compulsory education as a fundamental right of all children between 6 and 14, India is still lagging behind in education at the primary level.

Another reason behind the higher dropout rate is that people in rural and urban backward belts do not value female literacy. Sheetal is just one example and so was deliberately

chosen. In 2011 the literacy rates were 82.14% for men and 65.46% for women (as per the Census 2011). Can ICT be an enabler and fill the gender gaps? “We need a support system, which technology is capable of offering. My belief is that it is not rocket science to deploy technology even in rural schools. It can help change the mindset of the people and encourage them to focus also on female literacy,” remarks Veena Raizada, head, academics, Next Edu-cation and a prominent educationist.

A section of educationists even rests great faith in females when

it comes to inquisitiveness and learning ability about informa-tion technology. This section says that since technology is of great interest to female students than their male counterparts, it can be a big tool to curb the problem of female dropouts. The most recur-ring examples emerge from the IT sector where thousands of females are driving operations for Indian and global IT giants. Perhaps this is the reason that the last decade (largely dominated by ICT and tel-ecom sector in India) has seen an encouraging move in the growth of female literacy rates (11.8%) over male literacy rates (6.9%) as per the census. But it is just one aspect which is seen to have worked, if not as a benchmark, as a precedent for young females in rural or urban areas. “From our experience in the rural areas, we’ve seen girl students using computers and ICT tools more easily than their male counterparts, which strengthens our belief that ICT can really be an enabler in addressing the dropout problem in the schools,” shares Pallavi Rao Chaturvedi, director, AISECT (a Bhopal based education group that has centers located at the panchayat and block levels).

ICT: Answer to Infrastructure IssuesOn one hand, a push to introduce ICT based learning is making the rounds in government cir-cles, while on the other, there are schools bereft of even proper buildings, toilets, and the quality teaching staff to accommodate a set of students and educate them. Can technology be an answer to address infrastructure issues?

“The improper facilities and inefficient teaching staff are af-fecting the delivery of education in the backward regions. The ap-pointment of poor quality teachers under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan is

“From our experience in the rural areas, we’ve seen girl students using computers and ICT tools more easily than their male counterparts”

Pallavi Rao Chaturvedi director, AISECT

“There is no reason that technology can not address this issue if all factors are kept in mind. Availability of innovative ICT based learning tools is a way”

Jayaram K Iyer professor, Loyola Institute of Business Administration

“Technology can not replace teachers, rather, it is an advanced tool to empower teachers”

Shantanu Prakash managing director and CEO, Educomp Solutions

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no hidden truth. These things have to change in a certain time-frame. There is no reason that technology can not address this issue if all fac-tors are kept in mind. Availability of innovative ICT based learning tools is a way,” emphasizes Jayaram K Iyer, professor, Loyola Institute of Business Administration.

Technology also seems to answer the absence of a teacher in a class-room, when Paul shares his views on the infrastructure issue. “The lack of infrastructure and dedicated teachers who would foray into back-ward areas can also be mitigated by concept schools like that of Cha-manpura village, Gopalganj district, Bihar where children are learning algebra, chemistry, without a teacher in the classroom but on Skype,” says Paul of TalentSprint, citing some real examples.

But the classrooms without teachers is an idea that is discour-aged by most experts and education-ists. “Technology is an aid, which teachers can best use to make the students understand concepts. Technology can not replace teach-ers, rather is an advanced tool to empower teachers,” says Shantanu Prakash, managing director and CEO, Educomp Solutions.

It also has not been possible to take computer-aided teaching even into schools with proper civic amen-ities. Experts suggest that private and public players need to work

together to evolve ways. “To prepare a generation of young people to connect by helping them learn how and when to use technology, at least, there should be a fully equipped computer lab in each school. It has its impact, given our experience in many schools where we set up at least one lab in each school under Sarva Siksha Abhiyan,” suggests S Sridhar, director, marketing (Dell Education), Dell India.

Obviously to believe that ICT would be a quickfix is an effort to reside in the ivory tower. Informa-tion technology can be, upto an extent, an answer to infrastructure roadblocks in the educational system and might accomplish pedagogical needs but cannot be the solution that will rid of all pains overnight. “Extending access by the use of ICT is a good way to minimize the infrastructure pains. But it is wrong to believe that it is easy to deliver technology in every part,” argues Anand Ekambaram, vice president, HCL Learning. Perhaps, that is the reason most experts bet big on incremental approach and steadily work in this direction.

Hand in HandCreating common education infra-structure and offering opportunities to learn and grow is, without doubt, the government’s duty. But that does not mean the industry or private players remain laid back; they also

need to play a supportive role. It is an issue which can only be resolved through multi-pronged approach and that too, when all stakeholders in-cluding the government, academia, and companies sit together.

It would be wrong to mention that the education sector has seen no private-public partnerships. Upside down, PPPs are there for quite sometime now. The trend began with the opening of many government-aided schools. Even at present, when the tech-talk is do-ing the rounds, the companies like Educomp, Dell India, Microsoft, HCL Infosystems, and several NGOs are engaged in several educational initiatives of the government.

Educomp boasts to have adopted close to 11,500 schools under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and is working in different states to offer solutions and making schools ICT ready. Similarly Microsoft India has partnered with 12 state governments (including Maharashtra, Uttaran-chal, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Bihar, Mizoram, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh) to set up 14 Shiksha academies and operate close to 100 DIETS so far to offer a spectrum of education resources. Not lagging behind, Dell’s signature YouthConnect program has re-ceived the funding from Dell Giving Foundation, of $6.5 mn which boasts to have benefited over 300,000 children and youth across cities including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, Mohali, and Pune. The program is operational through partnerships with 13 NGOs in India, claims to have trained over 2,000 teachers through its capacity build-ing program. In addition, there are many other companies and NGOs that claim to perform an active role in rural and urban slum areas.

But to understand the compati-bility of the involvement, it is impor-tant to measure the impact of such

Discouraging PictureIf the figures are to be believed, there was a shortage of 6 lakh classrooms to accommodate all the students in 2006-07. Similarly a study of 188 government-run primary schools in central and northern India revealed that 59% of the schools had no drinking water facility and 89% no toilets. According to another study, 25% teachers used to be absent from school on any particular day in 2005. The average Pupil Teacher Ratio for all India is 1:42, implying teacher shortage. These inadequacies result in a non-standardized school system where literacy rates may differ. “Furthermore, the expenditure allocated to education was never above 4.3% of the GDP from 1951-2002 despite the target of 6% by the Kothari Commission,” writes Wikipedia.org.

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partnerships and engagements. “If technology has emerged as an effec-tive tool for education, it would be a mistake to undermine the strength of technology providers in taking technology into the education sector in a big way. They have the strength and expertise. But it is for the gov-ernment to look into the needs and make it easier for the private players in this sector where money seems like a distant dream right now,” adds Iyer of Loyola Institute of Business Administration. Professor Iyer sounds right when he supports

his argument with an example from Tamil Nadu. “Giving computers to students solves no problem. We’ve seen the failure of the laptop con-cept in Tamil Nadu schools. Govern-ment must understand the need of an expert in this area to make ICT an enabler for education sector,” adds Iyer further.

But technology also calls for a change of mindset. “Technology needs support from everyone—in-cluding teachers, parents, school management, government, and other agencies involved in it. It

is significant to ensure that our thinking does not prohibit the introduction of technology,” says Raizada.

In addition, public-private en-gagement is an inevitable step and has to be guided in the right direc-tion. “Public-private partnerships are the need of the hour and call for support, roadmap, and commitment. It is the perfect blend of expertise and support which should not miss the goal,” suggests Abhinav Dhar, director of K-12 business and opera-tions, Educomp Solutions.

Blackboard vs WhiteboardAs stated earlier, the technology has evolved and changed the way teach-ing and learning used to be done in atleast the affluent private schools. Wall-mounted and computational whiteboards have replaced the conventional blackboards. The solu-tion providers like Educomp, HCL Infosystems, Smart Technologies and Panasonic, etc have continuously developed solutions and created market for them. So, if it is per-ceived more as a battle between the blackboard and the whiteboard, we are not on the wrong side of things. More than a piece of hardware, a whiteboard symbolizes change of an attitude to welcome new ideas into the classroom environment. The change equally seems to direct us to make instant efforts and grope for ways that lead to the brightness which the whiteboards represent in some way. But it has to be a common decision to see what are the cost-ef-fective and viable measures to do all this.

“The intervention of technol-ogy into classrooms helps students understand complex concepts easily. In addition, it gives the choice of throwing several examples at the click of a button. The emphasis should be on grabbing attention of the child and internalize concepts for simplification. Technology is

“To prepare a generation of young people to connect by helping them learn how and when to use technology, at least, there should be a fully equipped computer lab in each school”

“ICT also makes accessible a library of quality study materials from across the world to teachers and students”

Sanjiv Pande country director, Smart Technologies

S Sridhar director, marketing (Dell Education), Dell India

“The emphasis should be on grabbing the attention of the child and internalize concepts for simplification. Technology is capable of both”

Abhinav Dhar director of K-12 business and operations, Educomp Solutions

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capable of both,” vouches Dhar of Educomp.

Raizada of Next Education also emphasizes on the whiteboard based teaching in the government schools. “Our experience suggests that if a class of odd 50 students makes con-tributions of `150 each, installing a whiteboard and projector for the delivery of digital content in a class-room should not be a hindrance. We’ve done this in schools where students from poor strata come and study. Certainly it has helped. The approach is surely going to help in government schools, if implement-ed,” suggests Raizada.

Taking the argument a little fur-ther, Sanjiv Pande, country director, Smart Technologies India and South Asia sees whiteboard based teaching as a platform through which deliver-ing digital content will no longer be an issue even for the distance learning environment. “This mode of learning is highly effective in allowing collaboration and learn-ing amongst students and provides them a holistic immersive learning environment and experience. ICT also makes accessible a library of quality study material from across the world to teachers and students,” says Pande.

Need for Fecund FacultyThe inclusive education would be a distant dream, unless who will teach is decided upon. At present, India is short of 6 mn teachers, out of which a considerable number is untrained or sub-standard. On that, teacher-absenteeism further adds to the woes.

ICT also promises assistance on this front. “Teacher-training is, to my understanding, the first and foremost thing we should focus on. Teachers need to be great story-tellers. But every teacher is not a story-teller. To fill the gap, the technology can be used to train and upgrade their skill levels,” Dhar of Educomp says.

Skill-enhancement and capacity building should also be undertaken to meet country’s educational needs. “To take to the students the benefits of ICT enabled education, we first need teachers proficient in the same. Not only should pre-service and in-service training include ICT, teachers must have access to high quality teaching material in order to impart their knowledge in the best possible manner,” insists Ghose of Micro-soft. It can probably lead to greater awareness of best practices in knowledge dissemination.

In addition, the capacity build-ing has to happen in an on-the-job training method. “Training of teach-ers can happen on the job as they can be trained in the class through technological means as happened in the western countries,” suggests Arup Datta, associate director, edu-cation, PwC.

But while it is done for the teachers in job, stress on impart-ing ICT-based teacher-training for prospective teachers during their B.Ed or any other training is essential. “In my view, ICT based curriculum should be introduced in the B.Ed courses so that the teach-ers who come out are prepared to

take on the role in new ICT-based environment,” regards Anand Joshi, professor of Welingkar Institute of Management.

It is easy to pass the buck on to the teachers—but there are usu-ally good reasons why they are not equipped to deal with the needs. Teachers are just a part of the proc-ess and not the process itself.

Connotations of ContentWhile the resonance of infrastruc-ture, approach and technology brings forth serious thoughts, the discussion will be inconclusive or largely bereft of soul if the value of content which will ultimately be transmitted through any technologi-cal medium into the young minds is undermined. While the industry boasts of the best in class white-boards, communication channels for the teaching communities and schools, isn’t it necessary to know what is being transmitted through these mediums?

When most companies and schools are laying focus on develop-ing and possessing hardware for the classrooms, less value is given to content—not in terms of text books or related material but in terms of the diverse multilingual set-up of the Indian geography. The reason is ob-vious, as points Rupesh Shah, found-er and CEO of InOpen Technologies (education content developer for ICT based solutions). “Since private sector schools have implemented the ICT based solutions and since their focus is largely on English-based teaching, it is true that most ICT based content being developed is available in English language,” says Shah. He further eulogizes govern-ment initiatives in many states like Assam, Maharashtra, Kerala and Bihar, etc to create content in local, regional languages through various partners. Not only, many state edu-cation boards under the guidance of NCERT are paying heed for a local,

INFORMATION TEChNOLOGy CAN BE AN ANSWER TO INFRASTRuCTuRE ROAD-BLOCKS IN ThE EDuCATIONAL SySTEM AND MIGhT ACCOMPLISh PEDAGOGICAL NEEDS

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the Indian education system such that it enables people to get jobs? “In India, unfortunately, we suffer from a 90/90 syndrome—90% jobs are skill related but 90% education is knowledge based. If we continue this way, we are fast heading to-wards a deadlock of quantity versus quality,” expresses Ghose of Microsoft.

Most experts believe that the emphasis should be on the educa-tion that lays thrust on employ-ability. And this is the reason, say educators and industry peers, that education loses steam even after staring big. There is a need to dif-ferentiate between a ‘literate’ and an ‘educated’.

shweta: an examPle for teachersWhen all suggestions seem valid and well-pointed, it is equally important for teachers to understand their role in the whole process. They must be forward-looking and keen to innovate in their own right as did Shweta Walishettar.Shweta was afflicted with polio and crippled for life but defied the forebodings to acquire a diploma in computer applications and found a job as a computer teacher in Karnataka’s BD Tatti School for the hearing-impaired. here her challenge was the sign language. “For me it was a challenge to teach students computer in the sign language. But I didn’t lose heart. With my colleagues and training which I took under Microsoft’s Project Shiksha, I worked on devising a new sign language to teach computers to the hearing impaired. The credit goes to all the team who also helped along,” says Shweta while taking us through the journey she traversed to overcome the odds and become an innovative teacher. She introduced this new language in her school, miraculously transforming computer learning for the specially-abled children. As a result, BD Tatti School is now recognized as a premier institution for the differently-abled and is a role model for the community. Perhaps, the teachers need to adopt Shweta’s attitude to learn and bring about change.

regional content which is easy to understand and learn.

But ICT has to go to the grass-root level and bring about a change which can not happen if the content delivered through ICT-based solu-tions is in English language. “Con-tent in regional languages will drive the growth, adoption and interest,” advocates Raizada.

Perhaps, the Union Human Re-source Development Ministry also understand the worth of the regional content and thus has called upon content and application developers recently after the rollout of Aakash tablet. “Similarly in the education sector you have to have some excel-lent content and then you can put

the same as TextBooks, e-learning or a Tablet App,” further adds Shah.

But does it show the value chain also for the content developers? It is something which application de-velopers and content creators would obviously look into before putting in any money and effort. The duty is of the government which has to show commitment and promote the need for content in local and regional language.

Employability Within ReachAs this debate inches to a close, it is irresistible not to ask: “Why do we need education?” To a com-mon man’s understanding, it is to enable a person to get a job. But is

“For me it was a challenge to teach students computers in sign language. But I didn’t lose heart”Shweta Walishettar a computer teacher in Karnataka’s BD Tatti School for the hearing-impaired

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Dataquest’s 3-step approachThe country has one of the largest

student populations (approximate-ly 300 mn) in the world. The question is simple. How can the 1.2 mn schools, over 400 universities, 18,000 colleges and over 6 mn educators, to start with, get the benefit of ICT to leapfrog? How can the reach be extended? How can quality be enhanced? And how can education serve to earn livelihoods and accelerate economic growth?

Based on the discussions with experts, Dataquest presents a three-step approach. The government needs to assess the applicability and take the necessary sub-steps to ensure that the gap is effectively ad-dressed. While they appear sequen-tial, the approach could be custom-ized. For example, trying to better the learning experience without solving the problem of access would

help only a section of the society. Similarly, waiting to provide high-est class reliability in connectivity before taking the next step looks impractical and time consuming. The middle path has to be found and taken. That is why it is advisable to involve educationists at every step.

Here are the three gaps and the solutions that can be built leverag-ing ICT:

#Make Education More Relevant:n Make vocational education a part of school curriculum. (This will make the educated employable and hence will attract them to education)n Use ICT-based platforms to connect them with opportunitiesn India has a chance to leapfrog. And be a role model for the next billion students globally who do not have ac-cess to basic education. The time is now.

#Enhance Quality of Learning:n Use of technology to better classroom experience. Incentivize sales to schools. Subsidies wherever needed.n Private public partnerships to create, support, and operate (if required) ICT based education systems. Integrate content creation if needed.n Incentivize local, small scale content creation (extremely important, but ignored at present)n Use of participatory education means such as internet (web 2.0), tele education etc

#Enhance the Reach of Education:n Mandated (subsidized, if required) connectivity for schools in all regions. Operators should have incentives and penalties.n ICT based teaching (both approach and tools) as an essential part of the curriculum in teacher education courses such as B.Ed apart from the on-the-job trainingn Localization of content to make it relevant and interesting for childrenn A monitoring system with a few parameters to be monitored and reported

Cover Story


After 25 years, since computers started influencing the society, the healthcare sector is standing at the threshold of a world of pos-sibilities thrown up by technologies such as virtual reality, cyber surgery, micro-robotic surgery, and 3D image modeling. Perhaps it

is a critical time that ICT is used to its full capacity, to take healthcare to more than 800 mn people living in rural and poor India. As per consultancy firm KSA Technopak, approximately 46% of the Indians still need to cover a fair distance to avail basic healthcare. In addition, hospitals, rural health centers, and dispensaries in remote areas remain understaffed for most part of the year, forcing people to go to private practitioners.

Does this scenario leave any doubt at all that healthcare facilities should be taken to every doorstep in India?

Taking healthcare to the masses needs planning, execution, and technological support. The government has to realistically redraw the circumference of its pop-ular citizen-centric health schemes like National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and inject an appropriate dose of technology to implement them efficiently and transparently. The industry needs to be, if not entirely, slightly magnanimous and look at all the aspects of cost, access, and convenience to augment health-care services in all parts of the country rather than sticking to large cities and towns alone.

A Dose of IT for India’s Healthcare Bringing the poor into the healthcare system poses a big challenge. But an integrated approach and adequate dose of IT can cure the ailments


While healthcare facilities in the Indian metros are competing with the world’s best medical centers, the scenario beyond the urban conglomerate is not encouraging

Cover Story


Overstepping Infrastructure and Finance IssuesMost Indians give least preference to health over other necessities. It is only when a disease or ail-ment hits them that they go to the doctor. According to a PwC CII report ‘Addressing the Unfinished Agenda—Universal Healthcare’, “While healthcare facilities in the Indian metros are competing with the world’s best medical centers, the scenario beyond the urban con-glomerate is not encouraging.” 30% of the Indians don’t have access to primary healthcare facilities; about 39 mn Indians fall below the pov-erty line each year because of the healthcare expenses; about 70% of the Indians spend all their income on healthcare and buying drugs; afraid of the expenses, around 30% in rural India don’t visit hospitals; and the healthcare needs of 47% of rural India and 31% of urban India are financed by loans or sale of assets.

Also, the healthcare scene is so lopsided that in critical situations the paucity of healthcare staff and im-proper medical facilities always lead to a higher number of casualties. “The remote areas are untouched by basic healthcare services. The flawed healthcare system loudly talks about the inequities and inefficiencies. The tier-3 cities and rural areas have very limited access to good quality healthcare,” says Dr Bobby John, president, Global Health Advocates India. The poor conditions in these cities and villages make it imperative for the government and the health-care industry to act on improving the healthcare delivery system.

The country’s rural health cent-ers are critically short of trained medical personnel. The NRHM report suggests that 22,669 primary healthcare centers are in a sorry state of affairs. Out of them, 8% centers do not have a doctor while nearly 39% are running without a

lab technician and about 17.7% without a pharmacist. This is when every primary health center is sup-posed to have one medical officer supported by a paramedical staff. Under the NRHM, the government has to make sure that the public health system is accessible, afford-able, and accountable in remote parts. “To ensure the delivery of services in every corner of the coun-try, it is imperative that we harness information technology to the fullest. To bridge the huge gaps in health-care system, it is important to figure out how we can use the expertise of one specialist in different areas,” says Arvind Sitaraman, president, inclusive growth, Cisco Systems.

Since the country’s reliance on technology has gone higher in other areas, it is the best time to make use of the resources using technol-ogy or ICT and address the issues that lie at the base of the pyramid. “Infrastructure is a basic issue, given the length and breadth of the country. But if ICT is given enough preference in the healthcare space, it will certainly usher a new era of change allowing access to maximum number of people,” says Venka-takrishnan R, director, Value Added Corporate Services.

According to a study, the number of beds available per 1,000 people in India is only 1.27, which is less than half the global average of 2.6. There are 369,351 government beds in urban areas and a mere 143,069 beds in rural areas where the larger chunk lives. Similarly, there are only 6 doctors per 10,000 people. Moreo-ver, the rural doctors to population ratio is lower by 6 times as compared

to the urban areas. “Adding one extra bed per 1,000 of population in India requires huge investments. Out of this, a good portion will come to IT, as it is now accepted by one and all that IT is a must for an efficient care delivery in the country. We see IT as a huge catalyst in further developing healthcare in India,” says Rothin Bhattacharyya, executive vice presi-dent, HCL Infosystems.

IT to Address Multiple Healthcare IssuesTo induce more effort into healthcare and make the e-healthcare a reality, it is imperative for the government to work closely with the private sector and technology players in the health-care space. Telemedicine is one area where the public-private partner-ships have cropped up in the last few years, but their reach is still limited. The PwC CII report further outlines that there is no country in the world where healthcare is financed entirely by the government. While it is pri-marily seen as the responsibility of the government to provide healthcare facilities, private capital and exper-tise are viewed as ways to induce ef-ficiency and innovation. However the key debate here is the role of private resources in financing and managing healthcare services and achieving the appropriate balance of public to private resources.

At present, the major constraint is the financial viability of e-health-care initiatives. This is despite several isolated initiatives from various organizations and hospitals for implementation of projects. For instance, the Indian Space and Research Organization (ISRO) has today 32 telemedicine locations in India and is injecting huge amounts of investments to help the Indian healthcare to graduate to the next level. To address this issue, collabo-ration in order to pool resources is required between different hospitals. For example, hospitals in a city can

Taking healthcare to the masses needs planning, execution, and technological support

Cover Story


share a common telepathology or teleradiology service. This can hap-pen between government and private hospitals so as to reduce the initial project costs.

“Telemedicine can be extremely beneficial for the people living in isolated communities and remote regions and help to reduce the cost of healthcare and increase effi-ciency through better management of chronic diseases, shared health pro-fessional staffing, and reduced travel time,” suggests Bhattacharyya.

While public-private partnerships take shape in the healthcare space, realizing the strength of technolo-gies that can play a catalytic role in healthcare becomes far more important from the government’s standpoint. Mobile penetration is no hidden truth. Steps to deliver health-care over this platform are often discussed in forums, but do not see any concrete difference at the grass-root level. “It is wrong to believe that poor, illiterate people cannot use it. The telecom success story is in front of us. The stakeholders only have to deliver healthcare in a simple form,” believes Venkatakrishnan.

The purpose of any technology is to deliver service and not become a headache. Hence the purpose of making use of IT will deteriorate if complexities are not reduced for common use. It is where the private technology players have a big role to play and transform the healthcare scene. “Even the illiterate should be able to use a tool being used to offer healthcare services in remote areas. Once successfully materialized, there will be substantial decline in cases,” says Sitaraman of Cisco.

When there is a talk about ICT, it is critical to measure the reach of current broadband penetration and explore further connectivity op-tions to bring at least 265,000 gram panchayats in the loop in India. “The internet pundits have always felt that the development and delivery

of medicine will be one area where this medium is likely to have im-mense benefit to mankind,” suggests Dr Sunil Shroff, president, Medical Computer Society India in his blog (www.medindia.net).

Doctors-cum-Engineers?While IT enables the healthcare providers to reach out to people in remote areas, it is also important to keep the doctors and healthcare workers ready for the tech platform. Often the mindset of the doctors and healthcare practitioners comes in the way of creating an IT-savvy healthcare workforce. Many resist to be at the phone for offering tele-health services through their health-assistants at remote areas. Their argument that they do not want to be tele-callers is also a concern. “It might be an issue. But if training is offered while in the course or in such a way that adopting technology does not become a headache, it will no longer be an issue,” remarks Dr John of Gobal Health Advocates.

In addition, the introduction of core IT programs into the MBBS cur-riculum is also cited as the need of the hour to train doctors for taking on the future medical equipments, which will be IT-integrated. Medical experts stress on the need of introducing health informatics into the course. Health informatics combine the fields of medicine, information science, and information technology to formu-late various systems for generating,

validating, securing, and integrating health-related data. “It will help providers, researchers, and patients to reap the benefits of cutting-edge methods, principles, and rules to alter the way healthcare is currently delivered,” says Bhattacharyya.

The IT solution providers have to look at ways or solutions which are simple to operate. “Ultimately doctors are doctors. And don’t expect them to be software or IT engineers. My belief is that IT solutions have to be simple to use. It will induce more interest from the medical community into this and allow them to offer their services remotely or without hav-ing to go to remote, rural location,” argues Dr John.

Linking UID, RSBY, and NPRWhen it comes to taking healthcare services to the grassroot level, utiliz-ing the network and support system of various e-governance programs can help solve the riddle. Almost every doctor agrees that if the history of a patient is available, it becomes easier to treat him/her. The govern-ment national initiatives such as Unique Identification (UID), Rash-triya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY), and National Population Register (NPR) are linked together to create a national citizen medical record database, it will help reduce the healthcare problems. “In my view, UID, RSBY, and NPR data can play immense role in addressing several health-related issues. The govern-ment must try to create a uniform health register for citizens through their data,” suggest Dr John.

“Medical records are critical in treating a patient. While the government tries to offer financial help through RSBY, data collection through such schemes can be used to address health-related issues,” sug-gests Rana Mehta, executive director, healthcare advisory, Pricewater-houseCoopers.

Steps to deliver healthcare over mobile platform are often discussed in forums, but do no see any concrete difference at the grassroot level

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Dataquest’s 3-step Approach

The country has a huge popula-tion to cure. The government

has the responsibility for framing the basic standard guidelines to make use of IT in healthcare. The

ICT ministry has come out with its recommendations by pushing some basic standards.

Dataquest presents a 3-step ap-proach. The government needs to

assess the applicability and take the necessary sub-steps to ensure that the challenges are effectively addressed.

Here are the 3 gaps and solutions that can be built leveraging ICT:

# Make Healthcare a Reality:24/7 healthcare advice and treatment in remote villages through a common mobile platform.To seamlessly fuse cutting-edge technology with touch-and-feel services thereby providing, preventing, diagnost-ing, palliating, and promoting healthcare.Technology will play a major role in bringing quality in healthcare, be it better nursing communication systems or patient monitoring devices. IT will provide for storing all medical records of a particular patient and will also enable quick access to such records.

# Enhance Effectiveness of Telemedicine:Use of Hospital Information Systems (HIS) to optimize hospital resources and provide best possible healthcare remotely.Pooling together resources by various hospitals within a city for creating either a common telepathology or telera-diology service, etc. The model will reduce the initial project cost.Private-public partnerships to create, support, and operate (if required) ICT based healthcare systems.Decline in the cost of telemedicine hardware (through tax reduction) to make it more financially viable for healthcare providers.

# Enhance the Reach of Healthcare:Mandated broadband connectivity for 265,000 village panchayats across the country through which remote access to healthcare could be made possible.Linkage of various e-government schemes such as UID, RSBY, NPR, and NHRM, etc, to create a National Citizen Health Record (NCHR).Use of mobile to offer healthcare services.Monitoring system with a few parameters to measure the impact and implementation.

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It is high time for stakeholders from technology, telecom, and banking sectors to start working together in order to achieve financial inclusion in a certain timeframe

Creating Disruptive Changes

Social inclusion was the slogan on which the UPA government came to power. Soon, it realized that no social inclusion is possible without financial inclusion. And since then, financial inclusion has been one of the more important priorities for the government. Of the 3 national

priorities we have covered in this issue—access to and quality of education, access to and quality of healthcare, and access to and availability of financial services—it is only in the area of financial services that we have seen a vi-sion, a coherent action plan, and significant actions on the ground. In fact, the prime objective of the huge UID project has been inclusion. The well-planned approach in financial inclusion has been possible because a single regulator, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is driving this. That coherence is lacking in healthcare, a state subject and education, a concurrent subject.

ONKAR [email protected]


That, however, does not mean that we are anywhere close to the goal. Close to half of India’s popula-tion does not have a bank account. More than 80% do not have access to credit or life insurance cover; 95% have no general insurance; and 98% of population does not partici-pate in the capital market. We have miles to go.

However some of the basic questions have been answered. For example, a recent realization is that you cannot get people to financial services, but rather take the services to them. The fact that the traditional branch approach is a slow, costly, and inefficient approach, is some-thing that the availability of ICT tools and services made us realize. The scope for intermediaries was also a recent realization, which was made possible by application of ICT.

Yet, if there are some things that are working and some that are not, the challenge is to keep readjusting the approach till we are closer to the goal.

Deadlines after DeadlinesWhile technology has been in-strumental in rolling out financial services at low cost in villages and remote areas, the classical prob-lem with the Indian system, that of dragging deadlines to future dates is unchanged. Earlier, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had set a dead-line of achieving 100% inclusion of villages with population of at least 2,000 by March 2012. It was later extended to March 2013.

Is it because the government or the RBI has laid less focus on mak-ing technology an equal partner in the game? Perhaps not. Rather the problem is of execution of schemes and enforcement on banks to spread awareness about various government schemes to the customers. The fact is well known to the RBI, that is why recently D Subbarao, the governor, RBI, directed banks to go beyond

opening accounts. “The main objec-tive behind financial inclusion is not only opening bank accounts, but also to provide information about subsidy, interest, bank loans, and other schemes launched by the gov-ernment for the benefit of people,” says Subbarao.

Though the financial inclusion is taking some time, we may feel that there has been a substantial progress in camouflaging a bigger chunk of rural poor under the bank-ing services. “Recent government initiatives to include people in the banking sector had a significant impact. Though the expectations are high, the length and breadth of the country is another big issue,” regards Siddharth Chaturvedi, director, AISECT, a firm that has been working with the government on financial inclusion front and of-fering services through the common service centers.

India may have half of the peo-ple unbanked even today, but the RBI has taken many initiatives to ensure inclusion over the last many years. Starting with the nation-alization of banks, priority sector lending requirements for banks, establishment of regional rural banks (RRBs), service area ap-proach, self-help group-bank link-age program, etc, the RBI has taken many steps to enhance access to the poorer segments of society. And the role of technology is well visible in steps like general credit cards (more than 950,000 in circulation) and Kisan credit cards (22.49 mn cards in circulation).

Graduating from No-frillsUndoubtedly, the government has embarked upon bold initiatives such as opening ‘no-frills’ accounts. But it is time to look beyond. Financial inclusion does not mean

Financial Inclusion—a Success with Village EntrepreneursRajkumar Soni, who lives in MP, learnt about the CSC project through an awareness program. He found it interesting to discover the business opportunity. He received training from AISECT and invested his money in buying one computer and setting up a CSC. Both online and offline services such as net surfing, data entry, bill payments, photocopy, printing, scanning, digital photography, typing, etc, were offered through his CSC. Later, he acquired training from the State Bank of India (SBI) to venture into the banking space and worked as a Business Correspondent (BC). Now, he is offering services like opening a new account, depositing money, and withdrawal of money. So, his common service center became a part of the financial inclusion scheme. Perhaps, there is a need to nurture a breed of village level entrepreneurs to take inclusion to the last mile. “Initially, the people were unable to accept this form of banking. They were unable to trust a third party to do their monetary transactions. But eventually, they came to know about its advantages. Without going to a city to access banking facilities, they could avail it all at their convenience,” says Soni.

With an initial investment of approximately `50,000, Rajkumar has managed to earn a commission of `188,545 till date. More than 5,000 people have accessed banking services through his center and a total of 5,156 accounts have been opened with a total transaction of `6,886,590. All sections of the society like farmers, housewives, widows, senior citizens, and school going students have benefited from his kiosk.

Cover Story


opening a bank account for every person in the country. The real purpose of financial inclusion will be achieved only when people start taking advantages through govern-ment subsidy, interest, bank loans, and credit cards, etc.

Started in the year 2004-05, ‘no-frills’ account was perhaps the first big step to encourage people to be the part of the banking or country’s financial system. But many banks complain that the accounts opened under this initiative has little served, since most of the accounts receive zero transaction, thereby making it difficult for banks to maintain. “No-frills account initia-tive was an encouraging move, but needs to graduate to the next-level now. The objective of achieving financial inclusion will be accom-plished only when all kinds of finan-cial activities are conducted through the banks. In my view, technology can help it take to the next level,” says Prabhat Gupta, former general manager of RBI and currently the country manager of Wolters Kluwer Financial Services India.

Making Co-ops Tech-readyThe challenge is to make the bank-ing sector efficient in terms of both allocation and operation. While the former pertains to easy access to people, the latter is about harness-ing technology rather than merely mechanizing to improve the func-tioning of banks. While the large banks in public and private sector own efficient technology set-up with sophisticated core-banking solu-tions, the cooperative banks and regional rural banks, which has the reach in the rural and sub-urban areas, are slow to deploy the core banking solutions. The obvious rea-son is that many banks do not have a scale to deploy CBS solutions and thus not capable of offering finan-cial services to the rural poor in a secured and fast manner. Hence the

RBI has laid its focus on empower-ing cooperative banks and urban co-operative banks (UCBs). The central bank have also issued a directive to the cooperative banks asking them to automate their processes over a CBS solution.

Today, there are a number of cooperative banks which have gone on CBS and are competing with the public and private sector counter-parts with the best of services like ATM, online banking, and mobile banking services. “The RBI has certainly played a key role in driv-ing the technology adoption in many of the cooperative banks. For those cooperative banks that do not have the scale to implement in-house CBS solutions, we suggest them to use the shared infrastructure for CBS,” says Hanuman Tripathi, MD, Infrasoft Technologies.

Of course, the technology is ready to automate the cooperative banks in a cost-effective way. ICT solutions are ready to position even single-branch banks against the large banks. “Cloud based CBS is a perfect fit for cooperative banks that have either a single branch or have less branches. It saves them the pain of managing infrastructure on their own and is cost-effective,” suggests Venkatramana Gosavi, AVP and regional manager, Fina-cle, Infosys.

Since the objective of reaching out to villagers cannot be accom-plished without the engagement of cooperative banks, it is almost imperative to incentivize financial inclusion program for these banks and encourage them to further their services through innovative meals like mobile, business correspond-ents, and common service cent-ers. There are cases of banks like Surat District Cooperative Bank, Himachal Pradesh State Cooperative Bank, etc, which have successfully expanded their operations after the CBS implementation. These banks are successfully offering ‘anywhere and anytime’ banking facility to their customers, thereby competing with their large counterparts.

Outreach through BCs and CSCsThe government, along with RBI, has allowed the banks to relax ‘know your customer’ (KYC) norms and has also allowed transactions through banking correspondents in places where it is not possible to set up a bank branch. In Janu-ary 2006, RBI permitted banks to engage business facilitators (BFs) and business correspondents (BCs) as intermediaries for providing financial and banking services at the doorstep. BCs have emerged as a great way to provide financial services to the poor in villages. The program is a combination of IT and banking. The business correspond-ents go to the poor and help them deposit money in their accounts through the wireless biometric devices. The model allows banks to provide services like cash-in/cash-out transactions, thus addressing the last-mile problem.

Furthermore, BCs are mostly lo-cal people whom the villagers rec-ognize and trust. There are many banks and financial institutions like SBI, FINO, EKO, technology companies, etc, who have engaged BCs in the rural areas. September

The real purpose of financial inclusion will be achieved only when people start taking advantages through government subsidy, interest, bank loans, and credit cards, etc


2010 onwards, for profit, the com-panies have also been permitted to be BCs now. “Business corre-spondent model brings the sense of localization and is a viable option for outreach measures. The banks can engage locals as BCs, thereby generating employment opportuni-ties,” says Gupta.

The payments and transactions are reflected in real-time, since BCs are equipped with wireless-con-nected gadgets. Even if the con-nectivity is not there, the data from the devices at the end of the day is extracted into a bank’s core banking platform. “Wireless and mobile pay-ment systems have enabled BCs to fetch locals into the financial loop,” says Ajay Adiseshann, founder and MD, PayMate.

Undoubtedly, the services these banks offer shall have business viability if more and more transac-tions are made through the no-frills accounts. BCs are perhaps a step in mitigating the issue. “We are work-ing through partners like FINO and Integra to offer banking services via BC model. It is a good step to en-gage the unbanked into the banking process,” says CVG Prasad, CIO, ING Vysya Bank. He further reveals that it is difficult to have business proposition in rural branches be-cause the volume of transactions is fairly low and thus recommends BCs as an option.

Common Service Centers (CSCs): Similarly, the BC services can be further provided through the use of CSCs in remote areas. CSCs are part of the e-governance initiative and being set up in remote areas like at the panchayat and block levels. “The government is promoting the rollout of financial services and pay-ment of utility bills through CSCs. We’ve a network of CSCs offering fi-nancial inclusion services in remote villages. In addition, it is an effort to encourage village level entrepre-neurs who can set up their own CSC

kiosks,” says Chaturvedi of AISECT.

Mobile: The Future of BankingMobile based technology is ubiqui-tous in India where more than 800 mn people have mobile phones. To achieve success for financial inclu-sion scheme, the use of mobile plat-form will play a decisive role. “Mo-bile banking will help achieve what credit cards and debit cards achieved in the previous decade. Even the farmers have mobile phones. They know how to use the device for daily usage,” says Adiseshann of PayMate. “We, along with Tata Indicom and Corporation Bank, launched ‘Green Money Transfer’, a person-to-person mobile money transfer service in November 2009. It had an over-whelming response. These kinds of initiatives from both the banks and the technology providers will surely have an impact,” he adds. “Mobile technology is a step forward towards achieving financial integration. Today, an illiterate villager too knows how to use a mobile phone,” says Anand Shrivastav, chairman & managing director, Beam Money.

The RBI also understands the role mobile banking can play in

spreading the transactions through the country’s financial system. That is why it has recently removed the ceiling of `50,000 per customer per day limit on mobile banking. The banks are now free to place per transaction limits based on their own risk perception with the approval of its board. The move will facilitate banks to come out with innovative mobile banking solutions for business. Even experts say that the move was inevitable as increased convergence would make it difficult to distinguish between mobile banking and internet banking. For instance, a customer could access his internet banking account through a tablet using mobile networks.

“Access to credit is signifi-cant. If it is being provided over a platform like mobile, it should not be a worry. We have today odd 80,000 plus branches. But they are not enough to serve the masses. So, mobile should be made the bank, if it can,” says Gupta.

Even telecom operators like airtel, Vodafone, and Tata Indicom, etc, are already in tie-ups with many large banks to offer mobile money.

Dataquest’s 7-Step ApproachUnlike in education and healthcare, the vision is clearly in place.

The challenge is to enhance effectiveness and leapfrog in terms of technology. Here are some specific recommendations, based on our discussion with experts:

n Use ICT to continuously look for disruptive innovations, not just improvements.n Create an achievement index and track it continuously; index can have penetration, availability of multiple services, and actual usage.n Create a development index and track it continuously; index can have inclusion initiatives, level of computerization of rural branches, etc.n Use the financial inclusion and financial inclusion technology fund more effectively; the later should be managed by IDRBT.n Incentivize indigenous solutions based on success.n Continuous research and testing of mobile based services.n Integration of government, retail, and financial services in rural areas.

Unified CommUniCations


Healthcare’s New Aid

Healthcare organizations are looking up to unified communications to improve healthcare delivery, employee productivity, and work-team collaboration through planned and cost-effective implementation

Only a decade ago, Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) organizations were primarily concerned with the solutions that promised improved patient safety, workflow, and financial opti-mization. Communication technology was a second-tier focus.

Paper based charting, which was prevalent then, kept information technol-ogy from having an impact on healthcare delivery improvements at the patient-doctor interface. In just 10 years, time has changed tremendously. Today, healthcare organizations are looking at applications; implementing them in a planned, cost-effective manner to improve healthcare delivery; employee productivity; and work-team collaboration. Hospitals in India are fast adopting various technological tools for the purpose of increas-ing their efficiency such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Picture Archival and Communications Systems (PACS), Radiology Information Systems (RIS), billing solutions, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Traditional telephone voice services have migrated from circuit based switches to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which enables more advanced Unified Communications (UC).

An IBEF report indicates that the healthcare spending in India itself is about $30 bn and is expected to go up to $80 bn in the next 10 years. By 2020, the Indian healthcare industry is estimated to be worth $275.6 bn. IT trends in India are picking up and it is estimated that $300 mn will be spent in the next 3-4 years on HIT in India.

Communication in HealthcareHealthcare is a communication intensive business. Good communication has a profound effect on the quality of delivery in healthcare organizations. Communication also has a huge bearing on patient satisfaction. Yet histori-cally, the options for how we communicate with each other in the healthcare industry have been somewhat limited. We are hampered by an industry that


Hospitals in india are fast adopting various tecHnological tools for tHe purpose of increasing tHeir efficiency

has far too long relied on old-fash-ioned telephone, paging, fax, and mail (both postal and interoffice); not exactly the most contemporary communication infrastructure.

UC Solves Healthcare Communication ChallengesHealthcare organizations are in-creasingly facing challenges—the ongoing pressures to improve operating margins while meeting the increasing demands for high-quality patient care. Implementing a UC framework can address these concerns by providing solutions that improve collaboration between the medical and administrative staff, enabling faster and better decision making.

Patient care and safety can be improved by more effective and accurate communication. Improved communication saves time and re-sources, which reflects as improved facility utilization. The effectiveness of communication at all levels—written, oral, and electronic—have the greatest impact on patient safety. The new UC technologies are secure and auditable and therefore support regulatory compliance requirements. Also, communication regarding patient-specific information can be restricted to those with author-ized access, unlike the earlier voice telephony mode. These new UC options often reduce the amount of time spent in communication. The value is usually seen in the reduc-tion of wasted staff-time, as well as cost-saving reconfigurations of com-munication systems. This technol-ogy will also have a profound effect on the way healthcare professionals conduct meetings and do trainings in the future, apart from facilitat-ing easy communication regarding round presentation, staff training, patient education, and more.

By using UC services, one will no longer be restricted to the telephone for communicating with colleagues

or patients. One can decide to use either a synchronous or asynchro-nous mode of communication. It al-most eliminates the hassles of wait-ing on hold or playing a phone tag on the telephone. Office telephone, smartphone, pocket-PC, laptop, tablet-PC or desktop PC, etc, can be utilized whether it’s an instant message, email, voice, or video com-munication on a single platform. UC has great potential to help health-care institutions save money and improve productivity; however UC alone is not enough. The challenge is implementing UC services so they result in role-enablement.

Roles in a hospital are highly specific and well defined. For ex-ample, a surgical nurse has a very different role than a neonatal nurse, and a radiology technician’s role is distinct from a pharmacy techni-cian. Not only are their roles differ-ent; their information and com-munication requirements can vary as well. This variance is the case for every role in a hospital—from doctor to billing clerk. When a life is on the line and a nurse needs to reach a doctor, the hospital’s com-munication infrastructure should enable her to contact that doctor as rapidly, effortlessly, and efficiently as possible. Technology should serve people; people should not be

asked to serve technology. Role-enabled communication takes into account the various roles individu-als play in a healthcare organiza-tion. Role-enabled communication seamlessly provide for the informa-tion and communication needs that meet the work-process requirements of that role. The fact that more healthcare institutions than ever are moving to Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), and Radiology Information Systems (RIS) is important because these technologies optimize clinical work-flow; however enabling interdisci-plinary teams with a truly collabora-tive communication environment is equally important.

Today, the healthcare industry is clear in its move towards becoming a paperless and wireless system. Due to heightened focus on HIT advancement, healthcare institutes are now increasingly deploying more integrated solutions that combine clinical technology with unified communications solutions at increased levels. UC provides integrated mobile communications to reduce the device proliferation so prevalent in healthcare institu-tions today. It also provides a single number that can be used to contact each user, thereby eliminating the guesswork and wait times associ-ated with using pagers and dialing multiple numbers.

Clinical mobility is crucial to overall healthcare delivery. Nurses, doctors, technicians, and therapists need access to current EMRs, wher-ever they interact with patients. It is one thing to put a computer on wheels, but quite another to expand the range of activities clinicians can use it for. When coupled with bedside voice services, integration of soft communications into COWS can dramatically increase their ef-fectiveness and give nurses’ access to patients’ EMRs and additional

Unified CommUniCations


RAVINDER RAINAThe author is head,

private network solutions (PNS), NEC [email protected]

vital patient data. Today, hospitals are gradually realizing the impor-tance of device consolidation and expense reduction.

Increasing Adoption of UC with the Indian Healthcare SectorToday, healthcare organizations are not only interested in learning more about these applications, but they also emphasize on implementing them in a planned, cost-effective manner, which help them in improving healthcare delivery, employee productivity, and work-team collaboration.

Hospitals in India are fast adopt-ing various technological tools for the purpose of increasing their effi-ciency. UC in health care potentiates numerous breakthroughs in daily operation efficiencies. UC solutions integrate the right communication tools into the context of the user and task to minimize labor content, delays, and errors while supporting operational requirements.

While computers and networks have been used for some time in the healthcare settings, they are still often tied to a specific, physi-cal location, requiring the presence of the clinician to be used. Commu-nication among healthcare workers in different areas often takes place via fixed telephones because most hospital regulations prohibit the use of cell phones in many areas of the facility. For clinical profes-sionals such as nurses and physi-cians—every moment they are tethered to a desktop computer or a fixed-wall phone is one moment they aren’t spending at the bedside with their patients or on the move to their next task. Increased mobil-ity for these professionals means increased productivity.

UC integrates various communi-cation methods, including voice, in-stant messaging (IM)/presence, call center functionality, unified messag-ing (UM), collaboration and confer-

encing over both wired and wireless networks. The benefits of UC are amplified in those organizations in which the workers are highly mobile and communication between them is both critical and time sensitive. The highly collaborative and mobile nature of clinical teams makes UC an essential investment for health-care organizations today.

Points to Consider while Deploying UCn Before deploying unified commu-nications, healthcare institutes must carefully plan and then implement accordingly. They should look at taking a phased approach while deploying UC.n The departments or clinics where UC applications will do the most good should be identified and then power users need to be selected based on roles for usability testing.n Before thinking about UC, insti-tutes should examine all clinical processes thoroughly. They should involve department heads to outline and agree upon an approach to implementing UC.n Gathering information about which roles and workflow proc-esses in each department can be enhanced with UC must be taken into consideration. Before imple-

mentation, organizations should also examine the network and make sure it can handle the increased traffic.n The UC solution is flexible and scalable. Also, be aware that some vendors have specific services and site surveys to test networks and report results. Consider integra-tion and remote network monitoring service providers.n Choose a single vendor with a proven track record of being able to integrate the necessary elements such as third-party applications.n An organization should choose investment protection. Make certain the UC solution provides unques-tioned investment protection and has a clearly defined, long-term product migration vision.

Controlling Expenditure, Optimizing InvestmentAt the time, when new age health-care industry is continuously facing a constant push towards technology advancement to keep pace with the rapidly expand-ing demand on resources and the rising demand for quality patient care, UC trend has emerged as the next big thing enabling healthcare providers support for improved quality, enhanced patient care, and managing costs.

The time has arrived when healthcare organizations need to assess their communication systems in the context of new age patient care. In healthcare, where efficien-cy and disaster recovery are key concerns, this new breakthrough technology provides immediate benefits in both areas, for acute care facility. n

an iBef report indicates tHat tHe HealtHcare spending in india itself is aBout $30 Bn and is expected to go up to $80 Bn in tHe next 10 years

IT In HealTHcare


In order to leverage theIr strengths, the governments must look at outsourcIng most of theIr work to prIvate operators, who wIll fInd ways of recruItIng, managIng, engagIng, and retaInIng qualIty doctors whIle meetIng servIce-level agreements on the healthcare provIded

to bridge the yawning gap between India and Bharat, especially in healthcare, the government needs to infuse confidence by technology innovations, outsourcing, availability of human capital, etc

Creating a Global Benchmark

An active and persistent effort in elevating India’s growth will in-variably set a global benchmark for the world to follow. India has a dynamic growing youth population with strong roots in educa-tion. In fact, every Indian family prefers to starve just to educate

their children. However job prospects are limited to the urban areas, while the rural heartlands where a majority of India lives, are deprived of any marketplace that can employ the educated. This scenario is creating a mas-sive divide between India and Bharat—the latter comprising of the rural regions of India. While most analysts tend to look at the divide in economic terms, we must also look at them from an inclusive growth perspective.

Achieving Inclusive GrowthTo achieve an inclusive growth, India must ensure that the services obtained in the urban areas must be accessible to citizens in the rural areas. Hence the availability of education, healthcare, a robust marketplace, and delivery of public services should become the critical parameters, which measure the level of inclusiveness. Thus, highlights the importance of providing quality healthcare at affordable prices to bring an inclusive growth.

Unhealthy RatiosWith 1 doctor for every 1,700 citizens, India has one of the weakest doctor-citizen ratios in the world. In many rural and remote areas, the ratio drops to 1:25,000. While the World Health Organization (WHO) advocates 1:600 for India, the US has 1:300 and China has 1:900. Therefore to meet the WHO numbers, India has to treble the number of doctors. However increasing the number of doctors alone is not the solution. As indicated, the lack of the pri-mary 4 components in the rural areas will automatically drive doctors to the urban areas, where a minority of the population lives. This will accumulate a number of doctors in the urban areas and escalate the shortage of medical care in the rural areas. Hence villagers will have to continue traveling long distances to get medical care. Often, meeting the expense of travel, stay, and


ARAVIND SITARAMANThe author is president, inclusive

growth, Cisco [email protected]

medical care makes it difficult for the families living in the rural areas to get the right medical care. Less than 10% of this population do not possess any form of insurance and end up paying 1.5 times more than their urban counterparts. So much so that, many choose to migrate to urban slums and take up a menial work to sustain themselves.

Allocating MoreRecognizing these challenges, the Planning Commission has advocated 7% of the central budget and 8% of state budgets to be allocated for healthcare by 2015. It even wants to step up the healthcare spend to 10% of the total central budget by 2025. Currently, at both central and state levels, India allocates 1.5-3% of its total budget on healthcare. In fact, the central budget allocation for health has stagnated at 1.3% of the total budget, and those of the states declined from 7% to 5.5%.

Creating a Structured FrameworkThis is a welcome proposal. How-ever where will this percentage of the increased budget amount go? As seen above, merely increasing the supply of doctors will not ameliorate the situation. We need a structured framework, which will help improve the quality and quantum of health-care in the rural areas. While the infrastructure and the increased availability of the other 3 ingredi-ents are essential in the rural areas, we need to do more for healthcare to reach rural population.n Technology Innovation: Ac-cepting that organic solutions will not meet the tyranny of numbers in India, the government needs to adopt technology as a means to deliver healthcare to Bharat. A Deloitte-CII report ‘Medical Tech-nology in India - Riding the Growth Wave’ highlights that technology innovation can be the tool to make

modern care accessible, available, and affordable to all by lowering the cost of delivery. A cloud-hosted video based healthcare solution to help the doctor and patient col-laborate over the network is not just practical, but also surprisingly affordable. India already has a route of 670,000 km of dark fiber laid that is still not lit because of lack of appliances. Why not leverage this investment to deploy healthcare by connecting doctors in cities to citizens in villages?n Development of the Human Capital: India’s investment requires to focus on the development of the human capital in the rural areas, to meet healthcare demands. If the country adopts a technology based solution, it can then spark large-scale hiring of healthcare profes-sionals, maintenance technicians, service staff, administrative assist-ants, and support associates in the rural areas. This will not only solve the healthcare solution, but also cre-ate employment in the rural areas. Most importantly, it will take money back to the rural areas instead of sucking money out, as the present structure is doing.n Public Private Partnership: The government has to adopt public private partnership (PPP) as a model, to bring healthcare to the rural India. As against the current scenario in infrastructure, a well-

structured PPP model can not only bring benefits, but can be a sus-tainable revenue-generator for the private entity and the government. Leveraging technology, the solutions can be easily measured, audited, and fine-tuned to meet local- and macro-level parameters.n Alternate Business Models: We must look at alternate business models. Currently, the government delivers healthcare through its primary healthcare centers (PHCs), taluk/district hospitals, and special-ty hospitals. In many cases, while the government has allocated budg-ets for doctors at PHCs, it is unable to recruit or hire doctors, who are unavailable for various reasons. Because of its inherent structure, government across the world face serious challenges while running businesses. They excel in manag-ing the disbursement of money and programs. In order to leverage their strengths, the governments must look at outsourcing most of its work to private operators, who will find ways of recruiting, managing, engag-ing, and retaining quality doctors while meeting service-level agree-ments on the healthcare provided.

Following these 4 axioms, we have a chance to not only revolu-tionize healthcare in this country, but also have an opportunity to create a new industry for the world, through the export of this model. For thousands of years, India has been the example for knowledge, medicine, and tradition. Now, it can pave the way towards bringing an inclusive growth by reinventing healthcare, using technology as the platform. n

to achIeve an InclusIve growth, IndIa must ensure that the servIces obtaIned In the urban areas must be accessIble to cItIzens In the rural areas


Cloud Computing

Cloud adoption in the pharmaceutical industry is witnessing growth despite the riders attached

Are You Ready?

Cloud adoption in the pharmaceutical industry is steadily growing despite the posed challenges. Why? Because by embracing the cloud, pharmaceutical pro-viders are able to access scalable storage solutions designed to handle massive amounts of digital information without overstretching IT budgets. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline have reduced their cost by 30% by adopting cloud based

solutions and other players like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and Genentech have al-ready begun experimenting with cloud computing. This article looks at the recent successes and provides insight into enabling pharmaceutical workloads on cloud platforms.

The leading pharmaceutical companies have started hosting complex genetic sequenc-es, clinical trials, and biomarker data in the cloud. Cloud based computing is ideal for data storage and analytics of the vast amount of data scientists and biologists generate in research. Eli Lilly is using the cloud to provide high-performance computing and storage to hundreds of its scientists, enabling it to reduce the fixed IT costs without compromising with IT services.

Pharma and Cloud: The Challengesn Data Set Size: The typical pharmaceutical workloads generate or consume huge amounts of data. The data store is generally collocated with the computation resources. Moving data from an enterprise location to the cloud and back is prohibitively expensive in terms of bandwidth and time. With a 4 Gbps network speed, it would take more than 2 hours to move a 4 TB data set. In data centers and enterprises, the data throughput is typically around 100 Mbps. The cost and actual time for data transmission could undermine this whole approach.n Regulatory Compliance: In the pharmaceutical industry, there are strict regulations re-lating to personally identifiable information, where private data can be stored, how and what applications can access that data. One of the challenges is ensuring and proving regulations have been met. Cloud services come with a basic set of capabilities and building blocks to meet these needs. Any solution that has to go through strict due diligence, auditing, and certification processes is a high-cost activity.n Security Concerns: Another aspect of regulatory compliance that needs to be addressed is the various security levels required of pharmaceutical data: Physical Security, End-point Security, Storage Security, Transport Security, Deletion Security, etc.

Leak of company confidential information must also be addressed. In a multi-tenant envi-ronment, it’s critical to ensure the application accessing data is trusted (signed and certified) and isn’t running in a shared environment accessible by another company.

Cloud Applicability and ApproachesTo commence, it’s important to conduct an assessment to figure out which applications and data can be moved—keeping in mind the criticality of the information that needs to be moved.

Data MigrationAn easy way to start is to move smaller data footprint workloads. Once the cloud stack is tested and acceptable, larger workloads can be moved to the cloud. The initial input data, currently within the firewall, has to move to the cloud. Once the data is secure on the cloud, it will re-


main there for future workloads and analysis as the cost for bringing it back is high and counterproductive.

StorageAny workload and associated data should be checked for data ac-cess patterns. If it’s raw data from a study, the data access could be within a second and may recur frequently in a day. If it’s patient images, access time may be a few seconds or minutes, but the fre-quency of access could be once in a few weeks. If data stored is associ-ated with a research query, then the access time can extend to hours and frequency may be 1-2 times per year. With this in mind, tiered storage can be created that has costs corresponding to the retrieval rate and responsiveness required.

SecurityIt’s possible to address security requirements of the pharmaceutical industry via a few approaches:n Private Cloud: Utilizing a private cloud platform can meet regulatory and confidentiality needs. Consumers of the service can utilize the self-service to launch workloads and use the reporting framework to determine the expenses related to the execution. Maintainers of the service can utilize the multi-tenancy model to reduce licensing fees, standardize on hardware, and achieve better economies of scale. Pfizer has been using cloud for its R&D projects and has adopted a virtual private cloud that builds an invisible wall around the compa-ny’s servers within a shared or public cloud. These servers, hosted by Amazon, allow the company to extend its firewall and other secu-rity measures to the cloud. The use of thousands of offsite servers has helped Pfizer compress its computa-tion time from weeks to hours.n Public Cloud: The least sensi-tive and lowest strategic value work-

ing return, it can be reviewed for effectiveness. The R&D team can focus on reducing the costs of such instances. The management team can make informed decisions on product development strategy based on this information.n Data Access: Once the data is on a cloud, it can be reused by multiple applications. This design can create data reuse not possible before. If the data is interesting to partners, al-lied research organizations, or even competitors, then it can be licensed out to these parties on a flat fee or utilization basis.n Creation of Services: A cloud technology platform certified by regulatory bodies and proven to scale to match pharma workloads is a valuable asset. This technology can be licensed or provided on a hosted basis for the entire industry. A conglomeration of pharmaceutical companies can set up a joint work-ing group to realize this vision.

ConclusionWith the industry needing to improve productivity, maximize existing investments in IT, monetize data assets, build a quicker road to product development, and focus on personalized drug creation, the cloud is no longer just an efficient way to manage IT functions, but the beginning of new business model for the industry. 2012 is the year phar-maceuticals will embrace and reap the benefits of cloud computing. Are you ready? n

loads can be run on public clouds in an effective manner. If researchers around the world need access to data, the public cloud can act as a data center which can be accessed by researchers everywhere. Eli Lilly, a global pharmaceutical company, moved its newly commissioned re-search workloads to a public cloud rather than investing in buying extra servers for their data center.n Hybrid Cloud: It is possible to retain sensitive data within a private cloud and use a public cloud to satisfy excess computing requirements that don’t require access to sensitive data by using a virtual private cloud. This estab-lishes a secure channel between the private and public clouds. Provided that the public instance does not persist data, this model can be used to create a hybrid cloud. Even if some sensitive data is required to be shared with the public cloud instances, a secure channel can be used to ensure transport security. The pharmaceutical companies con-ducting large-scale clinical trials can adopt hybrid clouds and con-tinue maintaining storage for opera-tional data inside their data centers. The companies can continue to run intensive clinical analysis computa-tional processes on the cloud. This hybrid approach delivers scalabil-ity, while reducing computing costs at that scale on a pay-per-use model that a cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical data to external vulnerabili-ties and threats.

Major Sources of RoIWhere the cloud can help pharma-ceuticals reduce costs include:n Business Alignment: With a cloud platform, it is easy to see the exact cost of a workload. This break-down leads to better alignment of the IT resources with the business goals. If a workload costs a lot to run but doesn’t yield a correspond-

SHRIRAM NATARAJAN AND ADITYA PHATAK

The authors are head, cloud practice and VP, life sciences and healthcare, Persistent Systems, [email protected]

Special RepoRt


Crystal Gazing 2012Come 2012, SBUs and SMEs too are expected to invest heavily on cloud, SaaS, and mobility using specialist help who leverage emerging platforms, tools, and technologies

India, Inc will not trim 2012 IT budgets, rather it plans to spend $25 bn in FY12. There would be a strong increase in the adoption of UC and collaboration technologies. There would be a strong spending led by the BFSI, BPO/ITeS sector as enterprises continue to invest in uni-

fied multichannel communications across voice, web, social, email, IM, and chat that are proving to be necessary for providing truly customer-centric interactions, scalable infrastructure, and videoconferencing.

Delays in domestic projects will continue to be a big worry for the IT firms. With FY12 being a little tough, the Indian companies will psychologi-cally feel they should exercise optimism with caution, although they may have reasonably good growth.

Weaker rupee will boost the IT sector profits since at a macro-level, ru-pee depreciation can benefit software exporters in India whose revenues are dependent on the US market; but at a micro-level, the Indian IT companies who have the exposure to foreign exchange are normally covered under forex hedging, thus the overall gain in the bottom line would be minimal.

Staying protected in the cloud is going to be one of the most imperative issues for the IT Industry in 2012. The IT security industry is at crossroads, like escalation of targeted attacks against companies, growth in the use of unsecured personal mobile devices, and cloud implementations. By the end of 2014, the penetration of cloud email and collaboration services will stand at 10% and will have passed the ‘tipping point’.

Rajeev Soni, country manager, Aspect Software India, South Asia, and Middle East


The launch of tablets and ultrabooks brought about a noticeable shift from the existing categories, initiating the desire for more portable gadgets. Tablet operating systems are expected to see further progression with the introduction of Android 4.0 and

Windows 8. Slimmer and redesigned versions of first-generation tablets with Tegra 3 are also probable to roll out. Tablets using quad-core chips are expected to increase in number in 2012.

Thin, light, and powerful ultrabooks are going to gain momentum.The emphasis on touch interfaces with thinner and lighter design of

ultrabooks could make this new generation of convertible laptops more desirable than the convertibles of the past few years. New ultrabooks with higher resolution displays are also likely to be unveiled.

Alex Huang, country head, system business group, ASUS India

India, as an outsourcing destination, will continue to remain the pref-erence for the global companies. Regarding the technology trends, we see 4 major trends in the overall outsourcing industry:

Total Outsourcing: The mature customers are moving to total outsourcing via vendor consolidation, staff transfer, etc, and then in turn driving end-to-end ownership, larger portfolio, or service integration across vendors.

Decline of Outsourcing Providers: Providers who cannot offer global companies a global outsourcing solution across locations and across portfo-lios are bound to decline.

Impact of New Technologies: Customer interface channels will increasingly integrate mobile or social media apps within the outsourcing delivery model. Hence the way customers interact with and perceive out-sourcing vendors will be affected by their ability to leverage these technolo-gies effectively.

Cloud: And, cloud outsourcing—implementation of cloud services and cloud integration is a space to watch out for.

Deepankar Khiwani, corporate vice president, Capgemini Group

While no one can predict exactly how the IT services market-place will change, we’re confident that the client demand will grow very rapidly in areas such as cloud computing, cyber security, and healthcare IT.

The key highlights for 2012 from an IT services point of view are likely to be:

Enterprises Mobility Market: It will grow dramatically; we have experienced an increased demand in testing services for mobility apps, es-pecially during 2011. With rise in the numbers of private application stores, mobility services are acting as the fuel in promoting information communi-cation technology globally.

Adoption of ‘As-a-Service’ Offerings: Most of the services offered by the software vendors today will soon be offered as ‘As-a-Service’, because it gives cost efficiency which is acceptable to most of the customers.

Narendra Nayak, director, sales, CSC India

Special RepoRt


In 2012, virtualization and cloud will continue to be the most-talked-about topics and we are going to notice their impact on the Indian IT Industry, the reason being shrinking IT budgets this year. Therefore the IT department will be under pressure from the Board to reduce

the IT cost. Virtualization has proven to be a great tool, delivering signifi-cant cost reductions and improvement in response time for server assets, recovering an application or developing a new application.

Cloud computing, too, will be hot this year, as the major cloud vendors have invested heavily, thus generating customer interest and momentum. However there are unanswered questions and inherent challenges in adopting cloud computing, but there are some benefits too that can be the game-changer.

Thanks to cloud computing, improvements in storage, processing power, or technology-enabled innovations that weren’t possible before have been made possible. Products like Facebook and YouTube were possible only be-cause of cloud computing. Today, unlike traditional outsourcing of IT, cloud computing will provide the agility and control that traditional outsource can-not match. With cloud computing and virtualization, we are going to notice a decline in the number of private data centers, cyber security becoming a major concern, and increase in mobile computing.

In today’s challenging times, technology will play a crucial role of helping business. Firstly, technology will again prove that in times of uncertainty what can be done with minimum cost and maximum efficiency. Convergence of customer prospects with vendors will play

a key role, technology will drive customer-oriented programs and tools, and mobile devices will play a key role in 2012. The winners will be those who constantly strive for value and technology, which will make things easier and simpler. Customer Relations Systems, Statistical Analytics, and Omni Marketing will be future trends of 2012.

Meheriar Patel, CTO, head, IT and e-commerce, Globus Stores

Notwithstanding the global economic slowdown experienced in the H2FY11, the growth story in data and the Indian economy continued unabated and is expected to continue in FY12. Data, considered to be growing globally at a rate

of an additional 5% of all previous data every month for a fast modern-izing economy like India, is probably growing even faster which is why storage will continue to be the fastest growing hardware segment.

The impressive traction witnessed by emerging technologies like virtualization, mobility, and cloud will gather further momentum in 2012. By the end of 2012, the big data phenomenon will become the buzzword.

Sectors like e-governance (security and surveillance), media and en-tertainment (full-motion video), and retail (consumer behavior and risk assessment at point of sale) will drive demand for big data solutions in India. Disaster recovery and network security are set to be the key chal-lenges faced by the industry in 2012 while mid-size businesses are set to drive domestic economic growth.

Surajit Sen, director, channels, marketing and alliances, NetApp India

Bhoodev Tyagi, leader, IT, Dun & Bradstreet India

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A mix of natural disasters, political upheaval, and financial crisis in 2011 has prompted companies to plan for 2012 against a backdrop of economic turmoil and great uncertainty.

The top storage trends for 2012 are:Storage Efficiency: Global economic uncertainty will require IT

professionals to achieve better returns from their existing assets rather than buying new assets. There will be a greater focus on storage efficiency technologies like storage virtualization, dynamic/thin provisioning, dynamic tiering, and archiving.

Consolidation to Convergence: Consolidation will give way to conver-gence of server, storage, networks, and applications. Application program-ming interfaces (APIs), which offload workload to storage, can make the servers and memory more efficient.

Storage Computerization: Storage systems will need to become storage computers as more functions are being driven down into them. New storage architectures with separate pools of processors will be required to handle these additional functions.

Big Data: The explosion of unstructured data and mobile applications will generate a huge opportunity for the creation of business value, com-petitive advantage, and decision support if this data can be managed and accessed efficiently. In 2012, there will be a greater adoption of content platforms in preparation for big data analytics.

Storage Scaling: Server and desktop virtualization will increase the need for enterprises to scale up storage systems non-disruptively as physical server demands increase. Modular storage systems will need to be replaced by en-terprise storage to service the tier-1 demands of virtual servers.

Virtualized Migration: Disruptive device migrations will be replaced by new virtualization capabilities that will eliminate the need to reboot.

Cloud Acquisition: Cloud acquisition, based on self-service, pay-per-use, and on demand will begin to replace the current 3-5-year acquisition cycle of products as convergence begins to create blended pools of resources.

In the past, industry leaders forecasted for long-term trends and have gone horribly wrong on the same. With the current pace of changes in the industry dynamics and technology trends, it’s no mean task to forecast even for the next 12 months.

In terms of technologies, what will be hot are:Social Media: Effective commercial usage of this powerful media will

be faster than what was envisaged.Tablets: It will be the fastest growing computing device. However we

may see de-growth in other areas.Mobile Apps: Convergence of media will be the biggest reality. More

and more innovative applications would rule consumer minds. The big question would be who will win this round—Apple, Android, Microsoft, or xyz?

Big Data: Slow but certainly catching up. Awareness and applicability would increase

Virtual Computing & Storage: In this zone, serious usage should startMiscellaneous: Risk management, compliance and governance will

be the area of focus; predictable, flexible engagements linked to outcome; revenue-generating, cost-reducing projects; mergers and collaboration

Technology is changing too fast and too soon. It will be interesting to watch out this space next year, and how these predictions go!

Dhiren Savla, chief information officer, Kuoni Travel Group India

Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems


I think 2012 will be the year where we might see the IT capex compressing but IT opex increasing. We will see more products moving towards SaaS, which will also start the movement towards public clouds. Tablets will rule the

market and keep the IT security and compliance teams very busy.Also, I think that we will see more open-source softwares in

the coming year. With the government focusing on the content of social media sites, we might also see some updates in the Information Technology Act. In the area of healthcare, we have already started seeing some mobile applications. We should see some customer-facing healthcare portals and products-supporting Homecare in 2012. With video conferencing becoming a com-modity item, we should also see tele-medicine area picking-up for remote healthcare. Medical outsourcing of today could grow from bare medical transcription to tele-radiology and other areas also. We will also see growth of voice reorganization based prod-ucts in healthcare. Clinical Analytics is another area, which will make a small start.

Neena Pahuja, chief information officer, Max Healthcare Institute

Recently, Gartner had discussed the top 8 areas where the industry may focus in 2012. As per the Gartner report, the evolution of virtualization will ultimately drive com-panies to treat IT like a business. Virtualization is one

of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers. IT will also have to address things like performance/licensing.

The growth of unstructured data will create a huge IT challenge. Technologies such as inline deduplication and automated data tiering will be used to get the most-efficient usage patterns.

With power consumption getting attention, it has now become clear that many systems are being highly underutilized. The focus this year will be to increase utilization per KW of power consumption.

In context-aware apps/enterprise mobility management, the big question here is how to do something smart to take advantage of smartphones/mobile devices.

In social networks, affordable and accessible technology has al-lowed individuals and communities to come together with a collective voice, to make statements about organizations

The key trend here is the fact that new application types will be developed to address mobile users, but they won’t be desktop re-placement applications. Still a secure, well-defined strategy needs to be put into place to take advantage of this development.

Similarly in cloud computing, we need to work towards an end-to-end visibility and economically viable solution, which may help small business segments and few applications areas for large busi-ness segments.

Pulak Tarafder, senior GM, IT technology, McNally Bharat Engineering Company

Special RepoRt


The world has changed a lot in 2011 and IT and BPO service provid-ers have pursued the agenda of growth and derived mixed results.

Will technology disruptions such as cloud, social media, analyt-ics, and mobility irrevocably alter the way value is provisioned and

serviced in 2012?While one does not have a crystal ball, it may help the organizations to

think of the road ahead in a structured manner. Three imperatives stand out:Strategic Agility: It has become more important and the locus of value

creation is continually shifting. The organizations must increase their ‘sense and respond’ pattern to succeed.

Customer Centricity: It has become more than a fad and may distinguish the successful players from the rest of the pack

Verticalization: It may not be adequate and vendors may need to em-brace ‘micro verticals’ as the operating units.

To deal with the above imperatives, ASPIRE is a structured methodology that may help firms to deal with these rapid changes and disruptions.

Aim and ArticulateStrategize: Clear focus, explicit trade-offs associated with the strategy, define duration of the strategy cycle

Plan: Establish a clear operational plan that will deliver the near term goals as per the strategy.

Introspect and Inspect: Set up checkpoints and toll gates to reflect; examine the market signals, disruptions, shifts in consumer buying behavior, and socio-political changes; and re-examine the assumptions made earlier while strategizing.

Realign: Fine tune the strategy in line with external and internal stimuliExecute: The realigned plan with discipline and perseverance

As 2012 dawns, we believe that it will be the year of ‘Materialization of Old Promises’ by strong momentum in adoption of 3 key services/technologies—cloud services, videoconferencing, and new age nam-ing—Brand gTLDs.

We feel that videoconferencing will truly move into the mainstream this year. Businesses will increasingly see the high value of videoconferencing, and more importantly, personal videoconferencing, as a key enhancer of collabora-tion and productivity. There will be significant adoption of virtual environments such as virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and cloud based VC services. The next phase will be on-demand videoconferencing cloud- and VDI-enabled services that are available to any business, regardless of size, delivered through infrastructure, network and application service providers. Couple this with good quality and ubiquitous 3G & WiMax or LTE and you will deliver the ap-plication on any smartphone or tablet. That will the point of EXPLOSION!

“The . will shift in 2012” I am referring to ICANN finally opening up Gtlds for anyone. Now Community/Geography applicants (.PETA/.Mumbai), Brand applicants (.TATA, .SBI, .DLF) and Generic applicants (.food, .music, .shop) can get their own TLD. The popular generic names are likely to attract auction bids in 10s of millions of dollars as internet companies and consortiums scram-ble for a piece of new age naming on the web. Forward looking brands and cities will surely get a piece of this for unmatched brand value and perception. This will open up the internet to huge amounts of innovation from a marketing and online branding perspective and ways in which brands and geographies manage to use this will constantly evolve.

Sesha Dhanyamraju, head, strategy and technology innovation, Mphasis

Jasjit Sawhney, CMD, Net4India

Special RepoRt


There has been a paradigm shift from technology for voice, video, and data to unified content, communication, and collaboration services, including social media. Therefore today with technology becoming an important driving factor in our lives, it is in our best

interest to acclimatize to it with minimum latency period. Considering the large-scale investments that are happening in virtualiza-

tion, it is going to help companies to lower the costs and give better utili-zations of the assets whether it is server, storage, or network. Some of the potential hindrances likely to come up while implementing virtualization are network configuration, software licensing, security, and systems manage-ment. Also, information management in terms of accessibility and monitor-ing of information with appropriate controls, including encryption, storage, and back-up facility, cannot be ignored.

Secondly, with the amelioration of business models and evolution of busi-ness processes, companies today are embracing technologies for an effective communication and seamless collaboration. There is a surge in demand for an adequate management of information and training people on the benefits of using these IT propositions/models. However the biggest challenge for a CIO in 2012 would be business continuity and disaster recovery with mini-mal downtime in natural, economic, and unforeseen crisis.

Ashok Sethi, CIO, Sapient

The next decade-and-a-half will bring disruptions, which are unimaginable today. So here is my list for 2012 and beyond; can’t predict that all of these will be applicable to everyone, but statisti-cally, over the year, you will find some connection.

CIOs globally will continue to be challenged on operating budgets. Capital investments will become relatively easier; operating expenses will need to be controlled very tightly. Business IT Alignment (BITA) will fall-off from the priority list for many, as it will no longer be an issue. Business will acknowl-edge IT contribution and will work with IT to plan business goals. There will be no separate IT goals.

Attrition will not be the problem, retention will be; with economic and po-litical uncertainty, staff will hang on to their respective jobs. CIOs will have to take some tough decisions. Clouds will be the first choice for deploying apps for the mobile workforce. The rest will continue to access applications behind the firewall. Hybrid clouds will remain experimental as CIOs figure out that it really does not save money. CIOs will no longer build data centers.

Led by consumerization, mobile devices will be out of IT control and personal devices will find a way to get inside the workplace; resisting CIOs will have to provide equivalent additional device, which eventually the busi-ness will turn down. Managing multiple screens will become a pain for the executive who will challenge IT to make it simpler. Over the next 2 years, the phone as a corporate device will thus be replaced by the tablet.

CIOs will or be forced to challenge the cost of sustaining big ERP (li-censes, support, etc) as it keeps growing; alternate support vendors will gain market share. Usage will shift out from the office to using marketplace-sup-plied micro-apps, thereby challenging the existence of big ERP in 5 years.

Social media fatigue will set in and even marketing teams will be asked to create RoI for expenses and investments on such initiatives. CIOs will need to manage expectations around social analytics, while consultants will thrive with maturity models and make loads of money.

Big Data will remain high on hype with vendors pushing and CIOs scratching their heads if it really gives the benefits promised. Custom de-velopment of solutions will wane with an ocean of micro-apps promising to enable business processes as effectively.

Arun Gupta, group CIO, Shoppers Stop

Special RepoRt


FY11 saw internet hacks and online security breaches dominat-ing the headlines.

Here are 2 major trends that I see continuing in 2012: Penetration of Mobile Devices—Lacunae: Driven by

the consumerization of IT and the BYOD trend, the mobile platforms like Android, BlackBerry, and Apple iOS are dramatically growing in terms of market penetration. India’s mobile workforce is expected to grow by about 53%. According to a Forrester Research survey, 60% of the com-panies are enabling BYOD. With this proliferation of powerful mobile de-vices within the corporate environment, IT can expect even more security problems in the form of malware attacks and Trojans in 2012.

Addressing Security Threats: The various entry points that mobile devices provide into the network, including employees accessing media and content-rich applications on internet may attract malware. Business-es will need a comprehensive security plan against today’s sophisticated threats that employees are unwittingly creating vulnerability to.

In 2012, the outsourced product development market will become more specialized, with ISVs seeking out outsourcing partners with specialized skills and resources to address specific pain points in their businesses, speed innovation, and reduce costs.

With the growing relevance of enterprise mobility and analytics, cloud computing, and SaaS acting as key drivers, ISVs are renegotiat-ing contracts with their service partners. In 2012, ISVs will be looking to add rigorous SLAs to the commercial engagement model with their service partners.

With the emergence of enterprise mobility and related trends of BYOD, more companies will buy enterprise mobility as a managed service in 2012, with enterprises outsourcing their enterprise software mobility development to specialized service providers.

In 2012, cloud sourcing will outpace traditional outsourcing, with organizations sourcing complete business solutions through the public cloud using a combination of cloud applications, platforms, and infra-structure. Also, with large enterprises and SMEs investing heavily on cloud, SaaS, and mobility, outsourcing partners will provide specialist help to the customers by leverage emerging platforms, tools, and tech-nologies in these areas. n

Keith Higgins, chief marketing officer, Symphony Services

Shubhomoy Biswas, country director, SonicWALL India

Cyber SeCurity


Deliberate attacks on the cyber space of government bodies has brought forth a new dimension of political rivalry and war between nations

Quarantining Cyber Space

China is waging a cyber war, after land, sea, air, and space. About 12 different Chinese groups, largely directed by the government there, do the bulk of the China based cyber attacks and stealing critical data from companies and government agencies. State-sponsored

hackers or backed by the People’s Liberation Army are trying daily to pen-etrate our computer systems, which include government agencies and com-panies, nuclear installations, IT firms, and utilities such as power and water companies to mention the private email accounts of thousands of Indians. To an alarming degree, they are succeeding. In recent years, hacks have been report-ed by the Indian Embassy, intelligence agencies, and the senior government officials, whose email accounts were targeted. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has been found quoting, “Telephone connections and emails from India that go through the Pacific (Ocean) can be intercepted and are being intercepted by China and the West. The information acquired from their intercepts are used as economic intelligence.”

China’s cyber warfare against India is becoming a serious threat to the na-tional security due to the desire to possess ‘electronic dominance’ over India. China has around 30,000 ‘cyber soldiers’ and has another 150,000 civilian or mercenary hackers, thus China to attack and then deny responsibility, but China has almost complete control over its internet, which leads to an easy assumption that these attacks are government sanctioned. China denies this al-legation upfront, which makes it difficult for diplomats to pressure for any kind of ceasefire also.

The malicious software or hi-tech tools used by the Chinese haven’t gotten much more sophisticated in recent years. But the threat is persistent, often burying malware deep in computer networks, so it can be used again and again over the course of several months or even years. The tools include malware that can record keystrokes, steal and decrypt passwords, and copy and compress data so it can be transferred back to the attacker’s computer. The malware can then delete itself or disappear until needed again.

In February, the US cyber firm McAfee, which markets anti-virus products, said that Chinese hackers had infiltrated the networks of oil companies around the world, stealing financial documents and other sensitive information.

India’s Paranoid Government OfficialsMany government agencies, senior officials, and even cops from cyber depart-


In recent years, hacks have been reported by the Indian Embassy, intelligence agencies, and the senior government officials, whose email accounts were targeted

PRASHANT MALIThe author is a cyber law expert.

(The opinions expressed are those of the author)[email protected]

ments use Gmail, Yahoo!, and redif-fmail accounts to transact official business, moving highly confidential and secret data beyond any secu-rity controls that may have been in place. Suppose I sent any email stat-ing ‘Governments New Pay Policy of 2011’ with a malicious link or attachment having a Trojan, almost 80% of people will open it and I would have a control on the major-ity of government systems. This was not a sophisticated or hi-tech attack though. Such attacks were made in August 2011 and systems, even offline machines, in the Ministry of External Affairs, which should be the safest, were compromised and their data sent to the adversary.

The National Technical Research Organization (NTRO), which only reports to the Prime Minister’s Of-fice and is a bone in the eye of the current Home Minister, has larger mandate to infuse cyber weapon technology. A much-needed draft cyber security policy enforceable by law which could have mandate statutory reorganization to this organization was lost in a sea of bureaucracy and not implemented. NTRO has a lot of technology but no powers to implement.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), now a statuary body is a central agency for responding to computer security incidents. Reportedly, it is a small, underpaid organization dependent upon contract employees rather than permanent staff. No one knows who is number 2 in this organiza-tion, except the number 1 good old patriarch with all the cyber security knowledge in India. It has come out with a Government Crisis Manage-ment Plan to be the master plan of India.

Apart from this, the Army-CERT, Navy-CERT, Airforce-CERT, the National Informatics Center, CBI cyber team, local cyber cells, all contribute to India’s cyber security

initiatives. Same bureaucratic prob-lem of guarding their own secrets within government agencies can create a rift among these separately functioning agencies.

Steps to be TakenFollowing steps can be enunciated to ensure security against cyber attacks:

n Cyber Warfare Divisions: More and more countries are setting up their own cyber warfare divisions; and experts predict that cyberspace is likely to be a key battleground for states in the 21st century—the US, Germany, and Britain have set up cyber warfare facilities. Earlier this year, China’s military established a 30-person strong internet security task force to protect China from cyber attacks. The establishment of the cyber warfare unit has caused concern in many Western countries, such as the US, Australia, and Ger-many, which accuse China of being behind high-profile hacking events.n Protecting Information and Data: In October, the National Security Agency, a secretive arm of the US military, began providing Wall Street banks with intelligence on foreign hackers, a sign of growing

US fears of financial sabotage. Next year, the global spending on cyber warfare will reach $15.9 bn, up from an estimated $12.5 bn this year, as governments respond to a range of cyber threats. n Diplomatic Discussions: Indian government should more directly confront the problem. It should demand that Beijing shut downs the state-backed hackers, if it does not do so, all electronic goods imported should be slowly weeded off. A diplomatic discussion not only on actual physical borders but on cyber borders should also be taken. Chinese incursions on Indian Cyber Territory also should be discussed in flag meetings, secretary-level meet-ings, and ministerial-level meetings. Such incursions should be strongly condemned at ASEAN, Saarc, and UN meets. Electronic evidences should be collected and preserved to support such moves. Cyber Com-mand of India to be established with complete staff at all ranks to be technical. ‘Bharat Firewall’—a firewall policy and actual firewall to be developed for controlling and monitoring all illegal internet traffic in and out of India. Government should start allocating money in their annual budget towards re-search in the field of cyber security, cyber weapons, and cyber law.

The need of the hour is that telecommunication networks and internet carriers of certain depart-ments or organizations like Power Grid Corporation of India, water supply departments, dams, airports, PM Office, Defence Ministry, etc, should be quarantined. n

IT STraTegy


Despite major breakthroughs in technology and large sums being spent on IT, CEOs are still not convinced about the value. Here’s how that can be done

Becoming a Tech Led Enterprise

A key imperative for contemporary enterprises is to become tech-nology led, create differentiation in the market place through technology and thus improve financial performance. Yet many struggle with the question: ‘How to become tech led?’ Major

breakthroughs in technology have happened in the last 3 decades and enterprises have spent huge sums on IT, yet the CEOs and other senior executives are anxious and unconvinced about the value it provides. And in the new and emerging economic scenario, the anxiety has only height-ened further, resulting into IT projects and budgets being subject to intense scrutiny and justification. One common and all-pervasive need is to know how value can be created through the use of IT and how an enterprise can become tech led.

What is a Tech Led Enterprise?Before we get into addressing the how, let us understand what a tech led enterprise is. Research has identified that IT’s value is embedded in an organization’s formal arrangements and cultural/psychological make-up. IT interacts with these aspects and that interaction determines what IT should do, what it can do, and what it can’t. And, this intricate relationship be-


tween the formal business arrange-ments, cultural make-up, and the IT, help us identify the 3 levers of creating business value: Business-IT alignment, strategic IT vision, and IT infrastructure maturity. This is depicted in figures 1a, 1b, & 1c. If any meaningful change and devel-opment has to happen, it needs a proper handle on these 3 levers.

A BVIT matrix is developed by plotting these 3 levers (strategic IT

vision, business IT alignment and IT infrastructure maturi-ty) on 3 orthogonal axes. As-suming two values for each, high and low, 8 quadrants are obtained. Any organization can measure itself on the 3 levers of business value of IT by using an instrument de-veloped by Coeus Age. Based on their scores (high or low) on the 3 levers, it can be mapped on the matrix in 1 of the 8 quadrants. Each quad-rant has a unique change and development need for an organization to create a

higher business value from IT.The 8th quadrant is the one in

which all the 3 levers are strong, ie, they have high scores and an organi-zation belonging to that is termed as tech led. Similarly, the one which belongs to the first quadrant, ie, all the 3 levers have low scores is termed as a tech laggard.

How to Build Business Value from IT: A Process ViewThe process of value creation is depicted in figure 2. These 3 levers determine what IT competencies are required by the business units, how are those IT competencies deter-mined, and how are they leveraged. In other words, the process hypoth-esizes that an enterprise’s perform-ance on the 3 levers leads to impact of IT on the organizational process-es, which creates business compe-tencies. These business competen-cies can be strategically leveraged to create business capabilities and when these business capabilities are valuable (the customer values them), rare (competitors do not have

Fig 2

IT STraTegy


empirical evidence from a recent Coeus Age—CMR research study among 305 Indian enterprises.

Performance Comparison: Tech Leds Vs Tech LaggardsThe recent study by Coeus Age CMR found 20% of Indian enter-prises to be tech led, and another 33% as tech laggards. The remain-ing 47% are in between. For the sake of brevity, we present a com-parison of the extreme quadrants of the BVIT Matrix (See Figures a/, b/, and c/).

IT spend when measured as a percentage of revenue provides a comparable measure. Though the tech leds spend higher on IT as compared to tech laggards, when it is compared with other quadrants of the matrix, it is relatively lower. Hence, when tech laggards start their journey to become tech led, their relative IT spend increases during the interim phases. However, as it progresses towards becoming tech-led, the IT spending decreases. On the other performance presented earlier, tech leds score relatively higher as compared to any other quadrant.

The empirical evidence demon-strates the fact that tech led enter-prise reap better benefits from IT but spend relatively lower. This is quite insightful, especially as busi-nesses in the current times struggle with the paradoxical demands of doing more with less.

Practices: Tech Leds vs Tech LaggardsThe comparison in the previous section demonstrates performance differences between tech leds and tech laggards at the process and enterprise level. Let’s now see what it is that tech led enterprises do, which enables them to produce higher business value from IT.

‘Tech Laggards’ and ‘Tech Led’ enterprises differ significantly on

b/ Tech leds achieve higher level of business competencies through IT competencies

Business Processes Tech Laggards Tech Leds1 Being a low-cost producer 3.9 4.8

2 Having manufacturing/ operations flexibility

4.1 5.0

3 Enhancing supplier linkages 3.4 5.0

4 Enhancing customer linkages 3.6 5.4

5 Providing value added services 3.7 5.4

6 Enhancing existing products & services

3.8 5.5

7 Creating new products/ services

3.6 5.5

8 Entering new markets 3.6 5.4

Rating of business competencies through IT competencies on a 7 point scale, where 1=not present at all & 7= present to a great extent;Source- Coeus Age CMR ‘Process of Building Business Value of IT’ Report, 2011

Business Processes Tech Laggards Tech Leds1 Last three years average 16.5% 22.6%

2 Expected in next 2 years average

20.2% 29.1

c/ Tech leds achieve higher business growth

Business Processes Tech Laggards Tech Leds1 In bound logistics (purchasing) 3.5 5.0

2 Outbound logistics (warehousing)

3.5 5.0

3 Manufacturing/ operations 3.8 5.0

4 Marketing 3.4 5.4

5 Sales 3.6 5.5

6 Customer Services 3.7 5.6

a/ Tech leds achieve higher impact of IT on business processes through IT competencies

Rating of IT impact on business processes on a 7 point scale, where 1=not present at all & 7= present to a great extent;Source- Coeus Age CMR ‘Process of Building Business Value of IT’ Report, 2011

them), imperfectly imitable (com-petitors cannot imitate them), and immobile (can’t be taken away), they allow an enterprise to charge higher rent and hence perform better.

Hence firm performance is a function of what unique business capabilities an organization can create, which in turn can be traced

back to how IT functions in an enterprise’s unique context. Tech leds are proposed to differ from tech laggards on IT’s impact on IT competencies, and their impact on organizational processes, the busi-ness competencies, and the firm’s performance through leveraging of those competencies. Let’s now see

Source- Coeus Age CMR ‘Process of Building Business Value of IT’ Report, 2011

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IT STraTegy


Kapil Dev SinghThe author is founder and lead consultant, Coeus Age

[email protected]

d / Tech leds spend (relatively) lower on IT

IT Governance Tech Laggards Tech Leds1 We have no ICT governance mechanism/ structure defined or

practiced in our organization24.2% 11.3%

2 We have no ICT governance mechanism/ structure defined but we practice one informally

39.4% 19.4%

3 We have an ICT governance mechanism/ structure defined but not practiced as planned

30.3% 12.9%

4 We have an ICT governance mechanism/ structure defined and practiced as planned

6.1% 56.5%

c/ Tech leds achieve higher business growth

Source- Coeus Age CMR ‘Process of Building Business Value of IT’ Report, 2011

the 3 levers of business value and their underlying aspects, as listed out below:n The role of IT as perceived by the senior management and practiced by the organizationn Communication, partnership and architectural alignment between business and ITn Governance structure and mechanisms for IT decision-makingn CIO role definition and organizational support for the samen Value measurement mechanisms (and metrics) for evaluating IT investmentsn IT management processesn Architecture definition at data,

application, technology and commu-nication levelsn IT infrastructure, applications, se-curity and communication technolo-gies deployedn Integrated framework for IT and communication platformsn New technology identification and development processes, andn IT skills availability and development.

As an example, let’s see how tech leds differ from tech laggards on definition and practice of IT govern-ance structure (definition of roles, re-sponsibilities and accountabilities).

Hence, tech led organizations have a well defined and practiced governance structure, thus aligning

individuals’ behaviors with the overall IT strategy. Governance structure has been found to bring in clarity on IT portfolio management, various IT deci-sion making thus minimizing the level of conflict and drag on IT projects.

Hence, we have seen that tech led enterprises perform better through IT despite relatively lower spending on IT. And this is possible not only with IT but rather how IT is defined and used, in the unique context of an organization. n

The empirical evidence demonstrates the fact that tech led enterprise reap better benefits from IT but spend relatively lower. This is quite insightful, especially as businesses in the current times struggle with the paradoxical demands of doing more with less.


CLOUD COMPUTING

Though cloud computing holds great promise, organizations should exercise extreme caution before embracing it especially from security, compliance, and legal points of view

Trusting the Cloud

Cloud computing is remolding the way information technology is stored, managed, and delivered. For many forward thinking IT manag-ers, the way forward goes to the cloud. In spite of the great promise of the cloud, some government agencies and enterprise organizations are

holding back from fully embracing it. For the majority of them, it all boils down to one question: Can they really trust the cloud?

Unlike any conventional outsourcing where it is still very much like uncon-nected computing, cloud separates data from infrastructure and obscures low-level operational details, like the location of the data and its replication technique, etc. Multi-tenancy, which is an oddity in traditional IT outsourcing, is almost a prerequisite in cloud computing services. These differences give rise to a gamut of security and privacy issues that not only impact your risk management practices, but have also stimulated a fresh evaluation of legal issues in areas such as compli-ance, auditing, etc.

Majorly, the issues and the constraints related to security and compliance on the cloud can be grouped into the following headers—

Security and Privacy: Concerns such as data protection, operational in-tegrity, vulnerability management, business continuity (BC), disaster recovery (DR), and identity management top the list of security issues for cloud computing. Privacy is another key concern. Data that is collected by the service provider for providing a particular service has major potential to be misused by the different marketing agencies. This data can be further used to promote some irrelevant


service and can cause undue stress to the user.

There is an utmost need to encrypt multi-use credentials, such as credit card numbers, passwords, and private keys, in transit over the internet. Although cloud provider networks may be more secure than the open internet, they are by their very architecture made up of many disparate components, and disparate organizations share the cloud. Therefore it is important to protect this sensitive and regulated information in transit even within the cloud provider’s network. Typically, this can be implemented with equal ease in SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS environments.

Organizations must approach the cloud with the understanding that they may have to change provid-ers in the future. Portability and interoperability must be considered up-front as a part of the risk man-agement and security assurance of any cloud program. Large cloud providers can offer geographic redundancy in the cloud, hopefully enabling high availability with a single provider. Due to a general lack of interoperability standards and sufficient market pressure for these standards, transitioning between cloud providers may be a painful manual process. From a security perspective, our primary concerns are maintaining consist-ency of the security controls while changing environments.

Compliance and Audit: The users who have compliance require-ments need to understand whether and how utilizing the cloud services might impact their compliance goals. Data privacy and business continuity are 2 big items for com-pliance. A number of privacy laws and government regulations have specific stipulation on the data han-dling and BC planning. For instance, EU and Japan privacy laws demand that private data—email is a form of

business-to-business or business-to-consumer website should be moved to the cloud only after careful consideration.n Country-specific regulations that affect the organization’s business and require specific safeguards. Industry regulations such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) in the US require safeguards to protect a client’s non-public personal information, depending on how the organization collects, stores, and uses the information. Under the US model of privacy, consumers have the choice to opt-out of the infor-mation being shared with affiliated parties; in the European Union, Canada, and some other countries, privacy laws are stringent and re-quire specific opt-in by consumers.n Auditors examining the cloud vendor’s policy on vulnerability management and reporting commit-ment to following up on potential security incidents, and ability to respond promptly to reports.n Cloud users’ experience with service level agreements (SLAs) and vendor management.

Legal and Contractual: Li-ability and intellectual property are just a few of the legal issues that you must consider. Liability is not always clear-cut when it comes to cloud services. The same goes for intellectual property (IP). For some services, the IP issue is well under-stood where the cloud provider owns the infrastructure and the applica-tions, while the user owns its data and computational results. In other cases, the division is not quite so clear. In software components-as-a-service, it can be difficult to deline-ate who owns what and what rights the customer has over the provider. It is therefore imperative that liabil-ity and IP issues are settled before the service commences.

Compliance with recent legisla-tive and administrative require-ments around the world forecast

private data recognized by the EU—must be stored and handled in a data center located in EU territories. Government regulations that explic-itly demand BC planning include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Basel II, Payment Card Industry (PCI), and the UK Contingency’s Act. The problem for the cloud customer is that applica-tions deployed to cloud fabrics are not always designed with data integ-rity and security in mind. This may result in vulnerable applications being deployed into cloud environ-ments, triggering security incidents and eventually compliance breach for that particular organization. Additionally, flaws in infrastructure architecture, mistakes made during hardening procedures, and simple oversights present significant risks to cloud operations. Of course, similar vulnerabilities also endanger traditional data center operations. A number of aspects should be considered by the auditors when re-viewing a cloud compliance stature for an organization:n Criticality of the application being sent to the cloud. While it is less risky to start with, sending non-critical applications to the cloud, significant applications such as a

Portability and interoperability must be considered up-front as a part of the risk management and security assurance of any cloud program


CLOUD COMPUTING

Areas of Concern Precaution/RecommendationGovernance The wide availability of cloud computing services, lack of organizational

controls over employees engaging such services arbitrarily can be a source of problems. While cloud computing simplifies platform acquisition, it doesn’t alleviate the need for governance. On the other hand it amplifies the need. The normal processes and procedures set in place by an organization for acquiring computational resources as capital expenditures maybe easily bypassed by a department or an individual and the action obscured as operational expenses. If such actions are not governed by an organization, its policies and procedures for privacy, security, and oversight could be overlooked and the organization put at risk. For example, vulnerable systems could be deployed, legal regulations could be ignored, charges could amass quickly to unacceptable levels, resources could be used for unsanctioned purposes, or other untoward effects could occur.

For an organization to ensure that its systems are secure and risk free, it is vital that proper governance policies and tools are in place prior to any substantial investment in cloud. Also, audit mechanisms and tools should be in place to determine how data is stored, protected, and used to validate services and verify policy enforcement.

Compliance and Audit Of the proliferation of regulations touching upon information technology with which organizations must comply, few were written with cloud computing in mind. Auditors and assessors may not be familiar with cloud computing generally or with a given cloud service in particular. That being the case, it falls upon the cloud customer to understand:

n Regulatory applicability for the use of a given cloud service

n Division of compliance responsibilities between cloud provider and cloud customer

n Cloud provider’s ability to produce evidence needed for compliance

n Cloud customer’s role in bridging the gap between cloud provider and auditor

Having said that, a customer will often need the ability to audit the cloud provider, given the dynamic natures of both the cloud and the regulatory environment. The client should obtain the right to audit clause from the supplier particularly when using the cloud provider for a service for which the customer has regulatory compliance responsibilities.

Identity and Access Management

In line with today’s aggressive adoption of an admittedly immature cloud ecosystem requires an honest assessment of an organization’s readiness to conduct cloud based Identity and Access Management (IAM), as well as understanding the capabilities of that organization’s cloud computing providers. The key areas which will need extensive focus would be :

n Identity Provisioning/Deprovisioning

n Authentication

n User profile management

n Federated identity management

Review and assess the cloud provider’s offerings with respect to the organizational requirements to be met and ensure that the contract terms adequately meet the requirements.

Capabilities offered by cloud providers are not currently adequate to meet enterprise requirements. Customers should avoid proprietary solutions such as creating custom connectors unique to cloud providers, as these exacerbate management complexity. Both the cloud provider and the customer enterprises should consider the challenges associated with credential management and strong authentication, and implement cost effective solutions that reduce the risk appropriately.


KALYAN KUMAR BThe author is director and worldwide

head, global practice, cross functional services, HCL infrastructure

service division, HCL [email protected]

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

The sheer pace of change and lack of transparency within cloud computing requires that business continuity planning and disaster recovery professionals be continuously engaged in vetting and monitoring your chosen cloud providers.

The service provider should completely understand and ensure that the Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are fully understood and defined in contractual relationships and are merged into the technology planning process. Ensure technology roadmaps, policies, and operational capabilities can satisfy these requirements. The client also needs to check whether the BC program is based or mapped to all the practices listed in BS 25999. The cloud supplier needs to be vetted via the company Vendor Security Process (VSP) so that there is complete understanding of what data is to be shared and what controls are to be utilized.

Incident Response, Notification, and Remediation

The very nature of the cloud program is confusing when it comes to determine the contact party to inform about any incident or security breach. The issue with cloud is that the applications are rarely designed with cloud integration in mind. This may result in vulnerable applications being deployed into cloud environments, triggering security incidents. Additionally, flaws in infrastructure architecture, mistakes made during hardening procedures, and simple oversights present significant risks to cloud operations. This may further endanger data center operations. The complexities of large cloud providers delivering SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS capabilities create significant incident response issues that potential customers must assess for acceptable levels of service. When evaluating providers it is important to be aware that the provider may be hosting hundreds of thousands of application instances. From an incident monitoring perspective, any foreign applications widen the responsibility of the security operations center.

stronger collaboration among lawyers and technology profession-als. This is especially true in cloud computing, due to the potential for new areas of legal risk created by the distributed nature of the cloud, compared to traditional internal or outsourced infrastructure. Numerous compliance laws and regulations in the United States and the European Union either impute liability to subcontractors or require business entities to impose liability upon them via contract. Courts are now realizing that the information securi-ty management services are critical to making decisions as to whether digital information may be accepted as evidence. While this is an issue for traditional IT infrastructure, it is especially concerning in cloud com-puting due to the lack of established legal history with the cloud.

The Way ForwardLike any developing and emerging information technology field, cloud

computing should be approached with due consideration to the sen-sitivity and integrity of data. Detail introspection and planning helps to ensure that the computing environ-ment is as secure as possible and is in compliance with all relevant organizational policies and that data privacy is maintained.

The objectives that an organiza-tion sets for its security drive the decisions like IT services outsourc-ing and moreover major steps like public or private cloud computing environment. Based on the above stated issues and doubts faced by the prospective cloud client, men-tioned are the set of precautions and recommendations for an organiza-tion, that it needs to consider from security in the cloud perspective (see Box). Large organizations, who are expanding their operations and looking for ways to neutralize the financial impact by exploring cloud option, should review and compre-hensively study the cloud providers

security function individually and decide whether the setup of infra-structure, the governing policies, the SLA contracted is sufficient to meet their set of needs.

The current cloud service offer-ing in the market is still in develop-ing stage and as a result, has yet to offer a convincing solution pertain-ing to security and compliance management. So in the end, it’s imperative for the organization to as-sure that the solution offered by the cloud service provider thoroughly addresses their security and compli-ance needs. n


Spotlight

IBM has initiated an educational program to cater to the increasing talent and skilled manpower requirement in the field of analytics

‘Smart’ Initiative

In an effort to bridge the manpower and talent gap in the field of business analytics

and optimization, IBM has initiated an Analytics Skills Program for universities in India and globally. It has teamed up with 500 universities in India for a first-of-a-kind faculty development program.

Incidentally, business intelli-gence and analytics are among the brightest prospects in business apps and one of the top tech priorities in 2012 as predicted by a survey in Dataquest, wherein 32% of the re-spondents said that they were likely to invest in the technology.

Propagating a via media for industry-academic-prospective students’ development in analyt-ics, IBM is working with universi-ties around the world to bring an advanced analytics training directly into the classroom. The company is thereby expanding its academic initiative for BA with new programs in India, China, Ireland, and Scot-land, helping students keep pace with today’s competitive job market by gaining skills in this fast-growing field of technology.

Ample PotentialThe company research reveals that everyday people are creating the equivalent of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions, and social networks; with almost 90% of the world’s data having been generated in the past 2 years. This literally

translates to much more data than organizations can effectively handle without applying analytics.

In fact, the 2010 IBM Institute for Business Value and MIT Sloan Management Review study of nearly 3,000 executives worldwide revealed that the biggest challenge is the lack of understanding in how to use analytics to gain insights that can improve business outcomes. Nurturing talent for catering to the growing market demand, universi-ties are now incorporating analyt-ics curricula and courseware into a variety of degree programs to educate college students in this growing field.

The new programs are therefore expected to provide students and faculty members with access to the latest software capabilities and thinking on how advanced analytics can be applied to tackle complex business and societal challenges.

Global Initiative Benefiting IndiaIn India, IBM is working with fac-ulty members from 500 universities to help more than 30,000 students develop skills in predictive analyt-ics. As part of the program, it will conduct a series of training pro-grams with business school faculty concentrating on predictive and

business analytics, in 15 major cities throughout the country of India. The faculty members will complete a certification process in analytics at the end of the program.

Upon certification, they will begin to teach students about

how analytics can be applied to their topic of study. The learning will involve access to predictive analytics technology and will focus on how to act on the results that the analytics technology uncovers.

With eminent academicians vouching for the effectiveness of the course, IBM is likely to further gain a foothold in the analytics business. “I have been using IBM predictive analytics technology in a number of programs at IIM Calcutta,” says Sa-hadeb Sarkar, professor, operations management group, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta. “I hope this initiative will help teachers in universities to learn and include analytics in existing courses and design new curriculum that will help students gain a top-notch education to meet the demands of today’s businesses and government organizations,” he hopes (As quoted in IBM press release).

“By combining IBM’s leadership in analytics with its global reach, we will begin to bridge the gap to bet-ter-equip students for new job op-portunities,” adds Himanshu Goyal, country manager, academic and developer relations, career educa-tion and localization, IBM India/SA, predicting an acceleration in global demand for training in analytics. n

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Spotlight


Vendors and partners are unable to gauge the exact extent of the ‘shortage of HDD’ crisis. It is predicted that the impact will continue in the Q1 of 2012. The monsoon flooding in Thailand that closed down a dozen or more hard drive manufacturing and supply plants, has caused around 40% shortage in demand globally. The other big

hit will mean millions of few PC shipments in the Q1 of 2012. According to the market research firm IHS iSuppli, the floods will result in a 3.8 mn unit shortfall compared to the previous IHS forecast issued in August.

At that time, IHS was expecting 88 mn unit shipments in the Q1 of 2012. Now it expects to ship 84.2 m PC units. The new forecast will represent an 11.6% sequential decline from 95.3 mn units shipped in the Q4 of 2011.

Manufacturers Association of IT Industry (MAIT) foresees big impact of global IT supply chain disruptions on India as the Thailand calamity disrupts global supply chain for key com-ponents of the IT Industry.

According to Alok Bhardwaj, president, MAIT, “The immediate impact is being felt for bulk supplies to government bodies like Elcot and DGS&D. We are keeping all state and central government ministries informed about the situation. Meanwhile all laptop and desktop compa-nies operating in India are reaching out to customers to request their patience. The association has appealed to the government and consumers to allow longer delivery period to combat the sudden shrinkage in the supply situation.”

Gartner, a research and advisory firm has predicted that problem will continue in the next few quarters. Speaking to the DQ Channels, Vishal Tripathi, principal analyst, Gartner said, “It depends on how soon the crisis ends in Thailand but gradually they are getting back on their feet but overall the magnitude is so huge that the problem might stand for 2-3 quarters. The prices will definitely go up and for some time the vendors can absorb the cost, after that

willingly or unwillingly they will be forced to pass on the customers. In coming quarters the consum-ers will definitely hold back their purchase.”

DQ Channels also spoke to some of the major laptop and component players to find out the impact of hard drive crisis on their business-es. HP came out with its release which said, “Given the uncertainty associated with the situation, we expect continued headwinds related to the flooding in Thailand, affecting HDD supply primarily within our personal systems group, but also in servers, storage and our imaging and printing group. HP is

Hard TimesThe monsoon flooding in Thailand that closed down a dozen or more hard drive manufacturing and supply plants, has caused around 40% shortage in demand globally

ABHISHEK ANGAD([email protected])


The worsening dollar-rupee rate in combination with reduction in supplies of HDD will have their impact on the product pricing

in constant touch with its employees, customers and suppliers to optimize business continuity and actively manage this dynamic situation.”

Rajesh Thadani, head, consumer business unit, Lenovo India said, “As of now we do not find much im-pact of the Thailand crisis. However, there will be an impact in the next quarter of 2012. Although it is a challenge, but it has opened a new opportunity for our other product categories such as consumer desk-tops, which is even cheaper than an assembled PCs.”

But the distributors are seeing the impact going deeper. VK Bhandari of Supertron Electronics said, “The shortage is evident. It is very dif-ficult to identify the extent of the shortage as Seagate is not confirm-ing on the issue. The demand has slowed and delivery is very less due to the price hike. The OEMs have already revised the price but very small quantities are supplied to India.”

The Indian market is not a matured one and often most of the products come with discounts un-like Canada and Australia. It then becomes anticipatory that most of the vendors try to focus their sale of products in countries like Canada, etc. Voicing the extent of the situation, Rajeev Mehta, CEO, Zest Systems said, “There is a lot of delay in delivery and it is really a bad situation. The picture is that most OEMs will attain normalcy by end of January. All the orders which got closed earlier are getting delayed and we are facing the loss. There is a world-wide shortage of hard disks and India is one of the negative mar-kets for OEMs, so we are facing the shortage and it will take time to regain.”

Looking at the market situation, Dell had also issued a statement. Talking to go-to-market strategy on the following, its spokesperson added, “We have worked through

various forms of industry supply shortages in the past and each brings different variables into play. But we have found our operating model to be very adaptable and effective at managing through these situations in an optimized manner.”

Another area which has also been adversely impacted is assem-bled PCs. The prices of assembled desktops have increased by `3,000. But for the branded PCs, the prices are yet to be passed on the consum-ers and all major vendors are specu-lating on the extent of it.

In response to the shortage, PC manufacturers are planning to increase their prices. S Rajen-dran, chief marketing officer, Acer pointed out, “The industry is cur-rently facing a huge task with the appreciation in the US dollar rate. It has witnessed almost 18% hike and this will be extremely difficult for any company to absorb. The second thing is the hardware drive availability. Being a global player with strong strategic relationships with vendors, the impact for us may be more muted from HDD avail-ability than other smaller/local players. The worsening dollar-rupee rate in combination with reduction in supplies of HDD will have its impact on the product pricing. The net effect will easily be in double digits. The situation is expected to settle down by the end of Q1 2012 and we are anticipating that by the middle of next quarter, normalcy will be restored.”

In the midst of all this when the DQ Channels, asked Rajendran about any alternative to mitigate the situation, he replied, “India being an extremely price sensitive market, we have very limited scope to look at other options like using the SSD. Based on the Indian con-sumer’s mindset, their preferences and buying behavior, we believe that the market is yet to mature and open to make a transition. Hence we have not considered opting for any such alternatives.”

While Rajan Sharma, VP, sales and marketing, Digilite said, “Since SATA prices have gone up due to the shortage in the market and will re-main high in the coming year as well, we have introduced parallel and IDE port motherboard to beat SATA HDD shortage. As we manufacture our motherboards in India itself, it gives us tremendous advantage in terms of economy of scale and helps to serve our customers on priority.

Both Seagate and Western Digital have announced that the drive shortage will continue in Q1 of 2012 following the massive floods in Thailand, where close to 30% of drives are manufactured. The region is also responsible for 70% of the components that go into manufac-turing hard drives. Adding to that, one of the major hard drive manu-facturers, Western Digital, which produces 60% of their drives in Thailand admits in a release, “The complexity and the dynamics of the situation that will require extensive rebuilding of the Thai people and government bring unprecedented challenges to the HDD industry for multiple quarters.”

After the problem, many compa-nies such as Simmtronics Semicon-ductor, which also manufacture HDD is making some profit. Inderjeet Sabarwal, MD, Simmtronics Semi-conductor said, “ The market has slowed but our sales have gone up by 20-25%.” n

Mobile oS


SHRIKANTH [email protected]

OS is the

KingThe Mobile OS market is getting polarized on innovation, apps user experience, and seamless communication and entertainment features

When Google recently announced its Android training in appli-cation development—a hands-on Android course designed to provide essential skills and experience with developing applications on Android mobile platform last week—the

industry sat up and it garnered the interest of the mobile apps developer community and the critical roles they play. It also signifies a shift happening in the Mobile OS space and how each vendor is gunning for more apps and OS market share. The Android training by Google is an attempt to gain more share and eat into Apple’s strong hold by handholding with developers and making them skilled to come out with more robust and innovative Android apps. This course is best suited for Java developers, who are seeking a fast track to the Android API and best practices. Throughout the course, the students develop a real-life application, which can serve as a basis for their future Android projects.

The OS EdgeA recent Nielsen report stated that in the US Android made it to the top spot with 39% market share, while Apple’s iOS made it to the second spot with 28% share, and RIM’s BlackBerry garnered 28% and made it to the third spot. Meanwhile, Windows Phone 7 and HPs WebOS market shares still hover in single digit. Clearly, the growing clout of Android phones indicate the fact that it is the OS and its apps ecosystem that determine the success of the smartphones; and it is not just the form factor, which used to be the sole criteria that determined the success of a smartphone in the past. Ana-lysts forecast that for a smartphone to succeed, the vendors who are able to foster a seamless access to innovative apps will be the ultimate winner. Let’s look at the initiatives of leading vendors on the mobile OS and the apps side of things in the recent times.

Apple iOS 5With the launch of iPhone 4S, Apple’s newest operating system iOS 5 saw the light of the day. Apple terms iOS 5 as the world’s most advanced mobile operating system with over 200 new features. So, is iOS 5 anything


different from Apple’s previous OS? The answer lies in Apple offering more user-centric functionalities. For instance, the iOS 5 has added features like notification center, which makes for an innovative way in managing notifications and another feature called the iMessage gives users the power to easily send text messages, photos, and videos between devices running iOS 5.

Pushing the innovation envelope further, as part of iPhone 4S, Apple for the first time has launched Siri—an intelligent assistant that helps users get things done by just by ask-ing. Apple in a release said that Siri understands the context, thus allow-ing users to speak naturally when they ask questions. For instance, if you ask: ‘Will I need an umbrella this weekend?’, it understands you are looking for a weather forecast. Siri is also smart about using the personal information you allow it to access, for example, if you tell Siri: ‘Remind me to call Mom when I get home’, it can find ‘Mom’ in your address book; or ask Siri ‘What’s the traffic like around here?’ and it can figure out where ‘here’ is based

on your current location. Siri helps users make calls, send text mes-sages or email, schedule meetings and reminders, make notes, search the internet, find local businesses, get directions, and more. Also, users can get answers, find facts, and even perform complex calculations just by asking.

Another new feature Apple has added along with iOS 5 is the iCloud, which is nothing but a set of free cloud services, including iTunes, Photo Stream, and Docu-ments, that work seamlessly with the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices. When content changes on one device, all your other devices are updated au-tomatically and wirelessly. Clearly, with iPhone 4S and iOS 5, Apple has raised the functionality, usabil-ity, and innovation bar.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich or Android 4.0While Android 3.0 Honeycomb was a dedicated tablet OS and on the Mobile OS side Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the current version

has got an update. The new version is dubbed as Ice Cream Sandwich. Google sources say that this version of Android is a significant leap from its previous versions and it offers a totally different look and feel as compared to the previous version of Android. The latest version was already launched by Samsung in its Galaxy Nexus phone. Going by the reviews of the new Android version, which has been called as a fusion between its Gingerbread and Hon-eycomb version, offers a rich user interface and offers better speed and performance. Moreover, the new ver-sion has replaced the physical but-tons with that of virtual ones and has enhanced features like an easier to use drag-and-drop functionality, op-timal muiti-touch/gesture features, and ability to seamlessly integrate touch with various apps running and host of other ones makes it the much desired update for all Android phones. Google has indicated that any mobile hardware supporting Android Gingerbread would be able to run Ice Cream Sandwich, but it is to be seen what kind of an update path major vendors like HTC and

Mobile oS


Samsung will give for its users for their pre-existing device portfolio running Gingerbread.

BlackBerry 10RIM is expected to shift its entire mobile platform based on its QNX operating system, and it is expected to manifest as BlackBerry 10. RIM is betting hard on its QNX based OS for its smartphones and hopes to halt its rapid slide in market share to Google and Apple. Interestingly, BlackBerry PlayBook is based on its QNX platform and RIM intends to bring that kind of an interface on a mobile form factor. But BlackBerry 10 as per RIM’s earlier indication had a timeline of 2011 end, but recent reports suggest that it will be launched only in the Q1FY12. With Android 4.0 and iOS 5 already launched, the new BB version has

to be really pathbreaking to capture the imagination of the users. Also, analysts hope BB 10 devices sport a dual core processor as the in the last quarter the industry has shifted to dual core processors.

Windows Phone 7.5Despite being an old-timer, Win-dows Mobile did miss the boom bus with Windows 6 versions. But in the last one year, Microsoft has taken on to the Mobile OS space very aggressively and its latest version is Windows 7.5 codenamed Mango. Microsoft has designed Windows Phone around one simple concept: People belong at the center of the phone experience.

OutlookAs we look at this point in time, the Mobile OS landscape is

dominated by Google, Apple, and RIM. Over 2012, one need to see how Windows will stack up with these vendors; and with Windows Phone 8 on the anvil, makes the market dynamics more interesting. Moreover, the strategies and successes of RIM with its BlackBerry 10 need to be seen. At the same time, the hardware ecosystem is also leaping. Today, all the new smartphone launches from vendors like Samsung sports a dual core processor and in tandem vendors are stretching the functionality of the OS that can do justice and leverage the hardware ecosystem. As we look ahead, during 2012 one will see more innovation and choice for the users, as vendors battle it out in bringing the best features in their mobile operating systems. n

“iPhone 4S plus iOS 5 plus iCloud is a breakthrough com-bination that makes the iPhone 4S the best iPhone ever. While our competitors try to imitate iPhone with a checklist of fea-tures, only iPhone can deliver these breakthrough innovations that work seamlessly together”

Philip Schiller senior vice president, worldwide product marketing, Apple

“Windows Phone will help change the way people look at smartphones. Other phones have you wade through a sea of apps, while we bubble up all the things that are important—centered around the people who matter to you the most”

Andy Lees president, Windows Phone divsion, Microsoft


news

‘With business models changing constantly, IT is the need of the hour’

R&D and it has helped us to stay ahead in the technology curve. We have a product roadmap for 5 gateway products to be released this financial year. CRM, our first gateway product, was launched recently. The remaining 4 products, viz distribution management, fixed assets, HR and payroll, and service management system, will be released soon.

What is the potential of IT to change the landscape of the power sector?IT is already playing a significant role in day-to-day operations of the organizations in the power sector. With business models changing constantly, IT is the need of the hour. Cloud computing will support the critical aspects of business model like carbon market. Analytics

How would you describe the traction in relation to Ramco OnDemand—analytics and gateway products?Ramco OnDemand—analytics and gateway products are the 2 new offerings launched under the Ramco OnDemand series. We realized that the organizations had a latent need to use the cloud initially for one or few of the business processes and then graduate to a full-fledged ERP. With organizations using ERP on the cloud for their day-to-day operations, the next step is to leverage the power of the cloud for decision-making. Ramco OnDemand Analytics is a pre-built business performance management software, which is a ‘switch on’ service offering for ERP on cloud.

We have witnessed a strong traction for both the products and expect a good number of organizations adopting the same based on their requirements. We are working with the leading telecom companies and partners to offer this product to their enterprise customers/prospects and bring them into the cloud.

Are there any future plans in relation to any other offerings in the pipeline?Since inception, we have had a strong focus on

will help crunch enormous amount of data coming through key measurements in real-time and enable intelligent decision-making. Smart grid related IT infrastructure will play a key role in both consumer- and supplier-led business model innovations. Currently, our clients include both private- and state-owned power generation companies in India and abroad. We expect many more to join our bandwagon.

How would you rate the adoption of ERP customers among SME customers?India’s SME market can be aptly labeled as the home to the 2nd largest number of SMEs in the world, contributing 65% to India’s GDP when the spending on IT is only 30% of India’s total IT spending. Global competition is driving increased IT adoption by SMEs and this provides a huge potential for an increase in IT spend among the SME sector in India. Technology is enabling SMEs scale to a growing customer base by providing them with an infrastructure to support their daily business operations. It has powered the SMEs to be flexible to the changing and highly competitive business environment.

According to Business World SME White Book

2010-2011, SaaS based ERP market in India is valued at about $7 mn (2.2 % of the overall $310 mn ERP market in India).

Please highlight the company’s future plans for the Indian market.In India, which is our home market, we have established a strong base as the leader in offering cloud enterprise solutions. India contributes 36% to the global pie. With the world looking at India as a hot market and organizations taking the plunge to stay competitive to grab the huge opportuni-ties, we expect a surge in India’s contribution.

Having enjoyed great success for our ERP offerings, our plan is to expand our analytics portfolio. In addition to Ramco OnDemand analytics and gateway products launched recently, we have also launched Ramco’s Automated Data Flow (ADF) solution from our banking analytics portfolio. Ramco’s ADF solution enables banks automatically comply with RBI guidelines for submission of returns without any manual intervention. We have received a great response for this unique offering from the target community and are poised to tap the huge market demand.

—Kamesh Ramamoorthy, chief operating officer, Ramco Systems

SHILPA [email protected]

news


Milagrow TabTops Appoints Anku SharmaMilagrow TabTops has announced the appointment of Aku Sharma as its product marketing manager. In this new role, she will handle the product launches, channel strategy, marketing strategy, technical training, and development in the organization. Prior to this work profile, since 2009 she was working as a venture capitalist in the business and knowledge solutions division of Milagrow.

Sapient India Appoints Rajdeep Endow as MDSapient India has appointed Rajdeep Endow as the managing director. This appointment is expected to be effective immediately, as Endow will be responsible for Sapient’s India strategy, capability development, penetration of its distribution, and delivery network. Although Endow has succeeded Karandeep Singh and will take over his responsibilities, but has also to shoulder current responsibilities.

People

‘With our open standard interfaces, we ensured customers’ pace to adopt technology’

Isn’t there a fear of vendor lock-in with the hardware and software from the same vendor?Organization always look for technologies which have lower initial costs, lower cost of ownership, better performance coupled with lower

What is your hardware strategy post the amalgamation of Sun and Oracle?This is a very exciting time for us with the completion of Sun’s integration. In the last 6 months, we have virtually revamped our entire range of products for our customers. We have broadly laid out 3-tiered options for the customers. The first option is that we are continuing to offer best-of-breed solutions, which has traditionally been the norm wherein customers can pick from storage and networking separately and then database and applications separately, and then can further integrate the entire stack themselves or through a SI.

downtime in all the products. With Sun, we deliver complete, open, and integrated systems to its customers—our stacks, hardware, and software are engineered and tested together. Although we have the complete stack technology covered from end-to-end, the reality is that some organizations would still like to take an à-la-carte approach.

What are the major CIO concerns and how is Oracle trying to address them?All of them have limited budgets and they are trying to do much more with their existing IT budgets; therefore total cost of ownership (TCO) is a major concern. The second apprehension is the

risk of deploying an IT infrastructure and third is business agility.

What sort of investments is Oracle making to take hardware to the next level?If you look at the last fiscal year, we have invested upwards of $4.2 bn in R&D and a large chunk of that went into hardware. This has helped us revamp our entire product line—we have newer SPARC processors, significantly higher performing, newer servers, newer storage systems, faster tape drives, and a significantly enhanced Solaris operating environment.

—Kapil Sood, vice president, systems business, Oracle India

STUTI [email protected]


Micromax Appoints New Top TeamMicromax India, the mobile phone maker, has made an announcement about the appointment of a new management team, which will be led by Deepak Mehrotra as the company’s chief executive officer (CEO) for the overall brand. Complete phone segment has been split into 2 divisions: Feature phone division headed by Khaja Muzaffurullah and smartphone division headed by Ajay Sharma. Prior to this, Mehrotra handled the work profile of operations, director, mobility business at the Bharti Group; Muzaffarullah was at a senior position in Sony Ericsson; and Ajay Sharma was the country head, smartphone division at HTC.

Siemens Hires Ex-US Commander as Unit HeadSiemens has announced the appointment of Stanley McChrystal, as the head of unit, which will handle the US government contract. Prior to this, he was a 4-star general commander in the US Armed Forces posted in Afghanistan and was terminated in 2010 by the American president Barack Obama, over his controversial remarks in a magazine. In addition, McChrystal will be the chairman of the board of directors at Siemens Government Technologies.

People

AVISHEK [email protected]

‘Ink-tanks drastically reduce printing costs’What is the concept of ink-tank?The ink-tank concept is a new revolutionary technology in the printing world. The ink-tank replaces the traditional notion of cartridges in the printers whereby the printer is equipped with more ink.

How can ink-tanks prove to be beneficial to the traditional cartridges?Printing with the ink-tank technology is ben-eficial as it tremendously reduces the printing costs. One can print a standard A4 size document with as low as 20 paisa every page for colour sheets

and 10 paisa for mono-chromatic documents.

How did you come up with the new printers for this technology?The ink-tank printers are a segmented range and the ink-tanks cannot be fed into any other printer apart from the

L Series that we have recently launched. The L Series printers come in 3 models: L100, L200, and L800. Unlike the normal dye-ink variety, ink-tanks for this printer is equipped with photo-dye ink and comes in a 6-compartmental variety.

What is your present market share across the printing range?In India we have sold over 3 mn units in the last FY, which will amount to `15 mn in monetary terms (excluding MFP range). In the market, we have 25% overall market share which puts us at #2 position. Segment-wise, in the dot matrix

range we have 60% market share; and in the inkjet variety, we have 30%. In the lasers, it is very low.

What has been Epson’s revenue in the last FY and what is the estimated revenue for this FY?Last FY, we were at `503 crore and hope to close the current FY at nearly `650 crore. Although, Indian market contributes less than 2% of the global turnover for Epson, we had a steady growth in India; and by 2015, we will cross the `1,000 crore revenue mark.

—SM Ramprasad, deputy general manager, Epson India

Deepak Mehrotra Ajay Sharma

news


Yahoo! Appoints Scott Thompson as CEOYahoo! has announced the appointment of Scott Thompson as its chief executive officer. Thompson is expected to lift the morale and business of Yahoo!, the way he did at eBay Inc EBAY.0, where he was working as the president of PayPal, an online division of eBay. And prior to this, he was the chief technology officer at PayPal.

Sanjay Puri Will Head Aspect’s Channels and Alliances as DirectorAspect has appointed Sanjay Puri as the director for its channels and alliances for India, Saarc, and the Middle East. Puri has to manage the organization’s channel and business development strategy in the area and will be based in Gurgaon facility of Aspect. Prior to this, he was the regional head, channels at the Dimension Data.

Sushil Prakash Joins NMEICT as Senior ConsultantSushil Prakash has joined National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NME-ICT). This project is an initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Prior to this, Prakash was working in the capacity of the country head, emerging technology, business innovation group at Tata Teleservices and has also worked as a CIO of Bank of America.

People

RUKHSAR [email protected]

‘We will expand aggressively in 2012’What is the strategy of ASUS to exploit the potential of growing importance of netbooks across tier-2 and -3 cities in India?Netbook has been gaining momentum in tier-2 and -3 cities, especially netbook is experiencing a good traction at the low-end of the laptop market. One vertical that is driving the growth is the education sector. We are appointing new channel partners for our retail expansion across the length and breadth of the country.

How has the year 2011 been for ASUS and what are your plans for the year 2012?ASUS has been successful

in delivering quality products for the ultimate computing experience. 2011 experienced the roll out of some of our strategic products like X101, Eee Pad Transformer, and the most recent Zenbook. Last year we focused on both value and volume, and this year also we will continue

to focus on the same approach. Along with that we will also have a special focus on our after-sales support. We have hired a massive number of human resources in the channel. We do not outsource any channel-related activity, as channel meets the customers directly and they become the deciding factor for the products. We want to be among the top 3 players in the next couple of years. For this, we are investing on people to come up with more channel- centric and consumer-centric schemes.

Which part of India is the key market for ASUS?The Indian market is

extremely critical. Being a huge country, the Indian market is widespread; it is too diversified with each region having its own market trends and preferences. So, keeping our focus and dynamics of the market in mind, we formulate different strategies for various pockets.

What are your retail expansion plans? Currently, we have 9 stores in cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Goa, Jaipur, Bhilai, Indore, and Calicut. We are looking at opening another 100 stores in 2012.

—Alex Huang, country head, system business group, ASUS India


Vineet Nayar in the List of ‘World’s Top 50 Business Thinkers’HCL Technologies has made an announcement about the selection of Vineer Nayar, vice chairman and chief executive officer, as one of the esteemed member among the list of ‘World’s Top Thinkers 50 List’. Nayar joins global stalwarts like Jim Collins, Michael Porter, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Don Tapscott, Linda Hill, Thomas Friedman, Steven Covey, W Chan Kim, and Renée Mauborgne among others in this prestigious group described as the ‘most influential living management thinkers’.

Partha Banerjee Joins Logica as DirectorPartha Banerjee has joined Logica India as the director, business development and customer innova-tion. Prior to this, he was working as the global head, solution development and customer innovation at Siemens IT Solutions and Services and also has worked at other senior leadership positions.

People

SHILPA [email protected]

‘CIOs perceive open source as a viable alternative to proprietary software’Highlight the importance of adopting open source, considering the fact that cloud strategy is being eyed with contention.Open source is growing in importance at all layers of the cloud compute stack. Today CIOs perceive open source as a viable alternative to proprietary software, both in their own data center as well as in the public and hybrid cloud environments. Open source is important as open standards provide freedom to users. The economic advantage of open source is even more visible in the case of cloud computing, because it is a scale-out model than scale-up.

At Red Hat, we have technologies to help our customer build their own cloud. This returns control to the customers and enables them to see the code, change it, and learn from it. Bugs are found and fixed quickly. When customers are unhappy with one vendor, they can choose another without

overhauling their entire infrastructure. Open source gives the customer power and choice to be not locked-in and also provides options so that there are no monopolies.

With increased adoption of cloud computing, how would you rate the safety environment?Security refers to how well one is able to leverage on the platform available. Security from an open source point of view in relation to cloud is very secure, as its underlying infrastructure layer is more secure owing to its authentication strengths.

Which of the verticals are witnessing traction

for open source?In emerging countries like India, adoption is mainly witnessed in 3 major verticals, namely government, BFSI, and telecom. With large IT investments being made by the government in projects and sectors like UID, ACS, and defense, state data centers and enterprise software need to be geared up for high-end computing. BFSI has heavy operational transactions and the need for low latency. The telecom sector faces the same dynamics as that of BFSI. It has to play with huge volumes—with over 800 mn subscribers and the costs of calls going down drastically.

—Harish Pillay, global community and technology architect, Red Hat

news


AKANKSHA [email protected]

‘The only way to beat commoditization is innovation’What are your plans regarding India?We are expanding our presence with a R&D center and sales office in Bengaluru. Till date, we have filed around 320 patents, where the existing team from India contributed around 10%. We are expecting to garner more talent pool here. We started India operations around 1.5 years back and grabbed a little less than 10% of the local market; this showcases the opportunity and traction for our offerings specially DTN and DTN-X. Considering the demand and our aggressive approach, our India business should grow by 25% year-over-year. This is the projected growth from China and other emerging market as well.

Beijing is our optical component center, but Bengaluru will contribute at a higher value by operating at system and optical level.

What helped in gaining this market share in this small span of time?We believe in anchoring partnership and to get deeper with a client in a relationship. We partnered with Reliance Communications, which gave us access to the market share with one big account. We are not chasing small partnerships but key clients with a long-term partnership vision.

Since you believe in innovation, hence in this market where routers and switches are getting commoditized and

prices of the products are further falling, what kind of innovation have you introduced for your organization?Yes, we believe that the only way to beat commoditization is innovation. Today, a good commoditizer will pull all profits from the industry and eventually dries up the R&D investment. We belong to a different school of thought. We take technology risks to beat market risks.

About innovation, the first basic rule is to follow Moore’s law for our integrated circuits for routing and switching. The next area is bandwidth management network and the integrated packet functionality. We are also creating massive innovation around coherent technology. Nortel was the first company to use this for an optical network and we got the talent from Nortel and are building our portfolio around it.

We have a team to convert this electrical signal into digital signal processing; this is where

we will be innovating a lot. So, we are talking about converging DTN and DWDN, the future will be a combination of DTN, DWDN, and MPLS.

But at the same time you are talking about cutting down the investments in innovation...We are not reducing the headcount and we are also not reducing the spending in R&D drastically, but we shall not be hiring anymore. Every year we spend around 25-30% of our revenues. The reduction will happen over a period of time, in the percent of overall revenues, but not in the amount. We have a pipeline of products ready. Our next-generation products (DTNX) are already in the market. So far, we were investing ahead of our revenues. We have to start looking at the revenues. We have the next-generation technologies ready.

—Tom Fallon, president and chief executive officer, Infinera Corporation

Noshir Kaka Succeeds Adil Zainulbhai at McKinseyMckinsey has announced the appointment of Noshir Kaka as the MD of its India practice. Prior to this, Kaka was the director, McKinsey and has now succeeded Adil Zainulbhai who was MD from the last 7 years, who has now been appointed as the chairman. Kaka will still connect with the clients along with the new responsibility of heading McKinsey’s operations in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Bengaluru. Kaka is a frequent speaker at Nasscom with which McKinsey has tied-up to make reports on the technology and business services industry.

People


Industry

Sify Launches Sify mystorageSify Technologies has announced the launch of Sify mystorage, which is an online storage and backup solution. This cloud based solution is for the consumers and small set-ups. It will provide end-users to insure critical files/documents, mails, photos, videos, music, etc, in the system against daily risks. It is provided in a range of prepaid plans, beginning from `175 per month for 10 GB storage.

TERI BCSD and Nasscom Release a Report on Environment

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)-Business Council and National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) have announced the release of a report ‘Sustainable Tomorrow: Harnessing ICT Potential’. This report aims to bring the ecosystem of users and service providers of IT applications on the same platform to address the issue of climate change and

environment sustainability. It has also clearly defined the role played by ICT in minimizing India’s energy needs by encouraging the activities, which promotes healthy environment without decelerating the economic growth. The report is a collaborative effort in form of a research project by TERI BCSD and Nasscom, with the assistance of its member organizations in recognizing technology, which can play an instrumental role in minimizing carbon levels and opening new avenues.

This effort targets to involve key state and central government agencies and present the issues and practices. In addition, it also indicates to adopt logical steps to reduce GHG emissions and speed-up green practices; and perspectives of other industry sectors on the large-scale use of ICT services and infrastructure for both mitigation and adaptation to climate change. A multi-case consultative methodology has been used to make this report. R&D experts from relevant divisions in TERI and members from ICT companies were involved as subject matter experts for the report.

Belkin Partners with SSK for Its Mobility ProductsBelkin India has made an announcement about the appointment of Shree Sant Kripa Appliances (SSK) as its regional distributor for West India. This partnership will promote Belkin’s mobility product range. As per this agreement, Shree Sant Kripa Appliances has to handle distribution of Belkin’s accessories for Samsung, including Conserve Valet, range of power packs and overlays.

Simplify360 Launches a Social Media Buzz Report on Smartphones

Simplify360, a social media analytics provider, has made an announcement on the launch of a report on ‘Social Media Insights on Smartphones’. The data collected to prepare this report was from more than 300,000 inputs from different social media sites comprising of microblogs, social networks, and blogs. Major findings of this report are—maximum conversations about smartphones happen on Twitter and that too in the age bracket of 26-35 (58%) followed by the age group of 18-25 (23%); and among all brands, HTC is the most popular (688 mentions) brand, followed by Samsung (477 mentions) and BlackBerry (362 mentions). Interestingly, biggest smartphone complain is its low battery life, especially in BlackBerry. The main features, which people seek in a smartphone are long battery life, affordable cost, optimum apps, comfortable screen size, and good quality camera. Another relevant finding has been that the users associate smartphone with Android, internet connectivity, tablet, and twitter.

news


Industry

HP Announces New Cloud SolutionsHP has made a formal announcement of the launch of new cloud solutions. These cloud solutions are based on HP converged infrastructure, which will enable advance use of private, public, and hybrid clouds by the enterprises and service providers primarily. The new cloud solutions announced are new HP CloudSystem integrations with Alcatel-Lucent, HP CloudAgile service provider program, HP CloudSystem Matrix 7.0, HP cloud protection program, HP Enterprise cloud services–compute, and HP Enterprise cloud services for SAP Development and Sandbox Solution.

Angry Birds Now Available on BlackBerry PlaybookResearch in Motion (RIM) has announced that the

Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Angry Birds Season will now be available to BlackBerry PlayBook users. This popular gaming series application from Rovio can be availed for `185.50 at BlackBerry app world.

GETIT and Bookurtable.com Join HandsGETIT Infoservices has partnered with Bookurtable.com for the convenience of its customers to book a table online in the restaurant of their choice. Due to this tie-up, customers can avail services at www.getit.in and choose from bookurtable.com’s live network of restaurants

(8,000+) for dine out/ordering in and location based discount coupons/offers (1,500+/month) in India.

BAE Finally Selects Infor10Infor, a business app software company, has made an announcement that Infor10 has been selected by BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI) to aid a business transformation program. This solution, which can integrate ERP, business intelligence, bar-coding, and a supplier commerce portal will help BAE Systems MAI to integrate its main business processes, improvise the system’s operational efficiency, and gear up performance in special programs like the Eurofighter Typhoon and F35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Tejas Bags National Award from TCOETejas Networks, the optical networking products provider, has been acknowledged with India’s first national award from Telecom Centers of Excellence (TCOE). This award was given by Sachin Pilot and Milind Deora, the ministers of state for communications and information technology, Government of India. Tejas has been considered the best in the category of ‘Indian companies with excellent telecom product profile’, and parameters under consideration were research and innovation, IP/patents generated, and market acceptance for the products.

HP Launches Portable WhiteboardHP has announced the launch of its new ‘HP Pocket Whiteboard’. The USP of this pocket whiteboard is its light-weight feature, which facilitates portability. This whiteboard is enabled with a receiver, which is compatible with virtual surfaces like standard whiteboards, flipcharts, or walls as it connects to a PC via USB cable and provides strokes and taps through a wireless stylus, providing access to additional software and online applications.


Industry

Deals4loans.com Launches Home Loan Balance Transfer CalculatorDeal4loans.com has announced the launch of ‘Home Loan Balance Transfer Calculator’, which is an online calculator. With the help of this calculator, an end-user can quickly estimate and compare the savings by switching their home loan. One can do so by putting the current home loan rate and pre-payment amount; and on that basis, this calculator will help in giving a quote of 4 different bank rates. Therefore the end-user easily gets to know the difference in saving.

Autodesk Asia Announces ‘Open Distribution’ Network

Autodesk Asia has announced its major expansion plans for India by launching an ‘Open Distribution’ network in India. This distribution network will be specifically for AutoCAD LT 2012. Now all the Autodesk volume products will be available via this open distribution network in India.

LACS Launches Easy Experience ZonesLakshmi Access Communications Systems (LACS) has announced its plans to start easy Experience Zones (EZ). These uniquely termed zones are based on new sales and distribution model to enable the channel representatives with a zero risk— it’s convenient and has the potential to increase income. Easy EZ will require100 sq ft of area, with a seed fund of `3.51 lakh, which can be financed and needs no sales tax registration due to direct billing by the company.

Milagrow Claims to Launch World’s First TabTop PC for WomenMilagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions claims to have launched the world’s first TabTop PC, specially designed for women professionals. This tablet which primarily targets working women, as it can fit in easily in their handbags, has preloaded applications, and is enabled with a UI. Milagrow’s Women TabTop PC is available for `13,990 at retail and major online retailers. It is enabled with features like1.2 GHz processor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM, security application, 8 hours of battery life, 3G/Wi-Fi Modem, and 8 GB expandable to 32 GB.

Citi India Launches Cash-To-Mobile Receivables Solution

Citi India has made an announcement about the launch of Citi Cash-To-Mobile Receivables Solution by its Global Transaction Services. This solution is specifically targeting the corporate and institutional clients from FMCG, telecom, media, healthcare, and travel to receive

funds from retailers or end-customers immediately through mobile platform. This solution can automate reconciliation between orders and collections.

MRM Worldwide Launches ‘Lufthansa Park & Fly’MRM Worldwide India has announced the launch of ‘Lufthansa Park & Fly’, which is an innovative mobile game for Lufthansa German Airlines. This interactive mobile technology based game utlizes the consumer’s mobile phone and LED screens to create a real life experience of taxiing the aircraft into its hangar. The technology for this game has been designed by the digital team of MRM Worldwide, Delhi.

news


Deals & Partnerships

Ozonetel Tie-up with GharpayOzonetel Systems, the cloud telephony technology company, has joined hands with Gharpay, a cash-payment network, which provides offline payments with the help of Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Ozonetel Systems will now offer the telephony interface, whereas Gharpay will handle the logistics for payment collections. The duo will provide a ‘pay cash after/before delivery’ payment service to the users who are not willing to divulge credit or debit card details over the phone.

Clingle Joins Hands with Red Bull for Sunburn Goa 2011Clingle, the geo-social mobile app, has announced that it has tied up with Red Bull to offer the updates (in the form of live interactive videos, audios, and photos) from Sunburn Goa 2011. This association will help the spectators attending the Sunburn event or those intend to get updates on the same can get the Clingle app, which is available on iTunes app store, Android market or the BlackBerry app world and follow Red Bull.

TCS to Fund `4.20 crore Project for RestorationTata Consultancy Services has announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Mumbai University. As per this memorandum, TCS will restore 85 m (280 ft) high Rajabai Clock Tower and library building along with the Indian Heritage Society, Mumbai. TCS will provide `4.20 crore for this project.

M&AWay2Online Acquires 160by2 for an Undisclosed AmountWay2Online Interactive India, the internet technology provider, has announced the acquisition of 160by2, which is a a person-to-person (P2P) messaging portal. This deal has been done in cash and for an undisclosed amount. With this partnership, 160by2 brings its 13 mn users to Way2Online and makes it a joint entity with registered user base to over 33 mn.


Spotlight leiSure

Why Lokpal Should be a Computer?We can have eminent people in the panel, but they should play the role of rule-makers, not investigators

SHYAMANUJA [email protected]

The Lokpal issue had be-come a sort of Emperor’s New Clothes. No politi-cal party had the guts to

question the concept itself. If the legislature, the judiciary, the execu-tive, and the press together have not been able to check corruption, it’s difficult to believe that a few more people, sitting in an office in Delhi, will manage to do that.

Let us face it: In a democratic country—and few can question India’s democratic credentials—the politicians or the judges or those from our tribe—the journalists—come from the people themselves. And if they are corrupt, that says something about our people. If the so-called ‘common man’ seems to be less corrupt, that is because he does not have the power to be cor-rupt. Power corrupts. And here we are talking about giving an absolute power to a set of people.

Am I suggesting that we have no hope? Not exactly. While you cannot check corruption by making some-one (or a few of them) more powerful than the others and expect that they will be honest; there is certainly a way to minimize corruption. And let me emphasize: The whole approach is different. It is to minimize cor-ruption—not stop it—by making it more and more difficult to indulge in corruption. The current hypoth-esis is that somebody will be more

honest and will try to check corrup-tion. Once in a while we do see an honest person and whether he is a politician or a bureaucrat or a police officer, he does make an impact. In real life, we have a few such exam-ples; in reel life, plenty.

On the other hand, if one tries not to fight the corrupt but tries to build a system that brings in trans-parency so that everything becomes transparent and available to a wide set of people—sometimes the public itself—it will automatically minimize corruption. It will make working a little difficult initially. But ultimately, the system will ensure that few dare to indulge in violat-ing the rules, doing something out of the way. A person may not fear another person; but everyone fears the public.

Such a system is not a figment of imagination. Neither is it Utopia. It’s there in some limited form. That has to be expanded; and expanded fast. E-governance has been touted as a godsend for bringing in effi-ciency. But once fully implemented, it would bring in transparency as well. Every bit of information will sit somewhere. We have already seen the power of WikiLeaks. Even today, corruption has come down signifi-cantly in the services that have been automated.

In a technology-enabled system, the information itself will have the

power to make everyone exercise restraint. A huge computing plat-form—let us say a supercomputer—can, on a continuous basis, monitor for exceptions. There can also be ways and means to lodge anonymous complaints by the whistleblowers. Initially, people may misuse it to trouble opponents. But soon, the system will take care of itself. If the processes and technology are good, a false complaint will result in calling out the bluff. So, there can be both proactive ‘prevention’ and reactive ‘cure’.

We have seen that happening in cricket. The third umpire—though there is a person whose name is associated with it—is actually a computer. The replay is on a huge screen for the world to see. And, technology ensures that there is no intended wrong decision. The same principle will work here.

By moving from an investigation mode to a prevention mode, the system itself will become more and more ‘less corrupt’. As far as the big computer is concerned, there would still be people to maintain it and run it. They may be bu-reaucrats or journalists; computer engineers or economists. They can be from all walks of life, even poli-ticians. But the power will lie not with them, but with the computer in particular and the whole system in general. n


LeisureBooks

Dataquest Reading List of 2011 Books If you have not read them already, pick them up now

Coming Upn Jaipur Literature Festival from January 20th to 24th, 2012, Jaipur [Look out for Michael Ondaatje, AC Grayling, Chetan Bhagat, Kapil Sibal (yes, he has written a book of poetry), Javed Akhtar, and Gulzar].Website: www.jaipurliteraturefestival.org

#1 The Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the Worldby Angela Saini

Though not exactly a technology/tech business book, this is one of its kind. Neither does it get into the complex phenomenon that is India nor does it scratch the surface superficially targeting those who want a quick refresher to the Indian IT and offshoring that serves their immediate need. It gets deeper into what has made India a technology superpower of sorts. A must read. A paperback edition is on its way.

#2 Steve Jobsby Walter Isaacson

Not many who read books and have anything to do with technology or innovation would have missed it anyway. But if you haven’t read for some reason, time to pick up. Do not get frightened by size. You can always skip portions.

#3 The TCS Story...and Beyondby S Ramadorai

Reading about a company, written by its ex-CEO, not exactly known for his wit and humor, may look to you a little too much. But the book is a fairly smooth read. In any case, even if it was not, for the sheer informa-tion about the company that started it all in IT for India is a must-read if you want to understand how it was then to cross each hurdle. We take too much for granted today. Would be an eye-opener for many.

#4 In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Livesby Steven Levy

Amazon puts it at its No 1. So, what more can we add? Except that it is far more readable than say Steve Jobs, which is Amazon’s #1 in the category of biographies and memoirs.

#5 What Technology Wantsby Kevin Kelly

Who else but a former wired editor can write this? There is so much of it all around on what we want from technology. Kelly argues that technology behaves in a particular way and draws an analogy of its evolution with biological evolution. Great writing and pretty engaging too. But not for bedside reading, especially if you have the habit of reflecting on everything that you read.

Amazon.com’s Top 10 Business Books of 2011

#1 In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives

by Steven Levy

#2 Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

by Howard Schultz and Joanne Gordon

#3 EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches

by Dave Ramsey

#4 Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

by Jim Collins

#5 Enchantment: The Art of Chang-ing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

by Guy Kawasaki

#6 The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

by Eric Ries

#7 Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy

by Martin Lindstrom

#8 Endgame: The End of the Debt Supercycle and How it Changes Everything

by John Mauldin

#9 Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity

by Josh Linkner

#10 Poke the Boxby Seth Godin


DQ SnippetS LeiSure

PartnershiP PleaseA recent conference of tier-2 and -3 system integrators in Colombo, was an eye-opener. First, the ease with which we were able to approach the Sri Lankan Technology Minister, Tissa Vitharana, compared to our Indian bureaucratic red tape and mire, to be the chief guest. His office responded quickly and confirmed. At Delhi Sanchar Bhavan and Electronics Niketan, one would have had to struggle endlessly with no result. The minister arrived on time, delivered an excellent speech, and called for closer co-operation between the IT industry in both nations. What however raised a few eyebrows was his statement that the Indian companies should look at partnering with the Sri Lankan players, to better access the local market. What was equally interesting was when Vitharana added that if India wants to reach out to markets in Saarc countries, Sri Lanka can be the gateway. Indians, often not very popular among their neighbors, could explore this opportunity. Speaks volumes for a government serious about growth and building relationships.

Desi GheeHaving dealt with bureaucrats for years, even if they were involved with information technology, my colleague and I were taken for a big surprise on a recent visit to meet a secretary in India’s most populous state. Not only was our phone immediately picked up when we called his office to inform that we were running 15 minutes late, we had a peon waiting to receive us and help us with the gate passes and car parking. After that we were escorted to the secretary’s office, served water and a hot cup of tea and biscuits as we waited. The meeting lasted for 1 hour, but was not of any use because the secretary was mostly busy trying to organize ‘desi ghee’ for a family function; it was only when we were on our way out that we discovered the peon’s great hospitality. While escorting us out he sensed we were ignoring his signals and then openly said, ‘Saab aapki ek ghante ki meeting kara di. Kuchh inam to banta hai’ (Sir, I organized a 1-hour meeting for you. I deserve a reward). Speaking to other people, later we were told this was the ‘desi ghee’ secretary’s modus operandi. Anna Hazare, the anti-corruption crusader, is often accused of going soft on some of the non-Congress-ruled states. Lucknow could be the next destination for him.

rail MailOn my way back, I took the Delhi Rajdhani from Patna. Quite a few of my co-travelers in the AC compartment, I discovered, were going to the Board, which I later discovered, was the Railway Board. These were Indian Railways employees, coming from various Indian Railways offices in Bihar, but all were heading for the Railway Board office in Delhi. A couple of them, during the casual chit-chat, informed me that they were traveling all the way to deliver a letter. But why could it not be emailed? Most emails don’t reach Sir, was one honest reply. As per one employee, the email print-outs of the confidential letters will float all over the department before it reaches the concerned officer. Good reasons to stick to the rail mails.

CaMera MiGhtier than stiCkThis one takes the award for innovative thinking. On a recent trip to Sheikhpura, a new district carved out of the Monghyr district in Bihar, I had the opportunity of interacting with the local SDO. A man who seemed to be fumbling with his cell phone, he otherwise appeared to be a very active user of a digital camera. He seemed to know most of the features and functions, which most of us do not know even for simple digital cameras. When I complimented him, he said he uses the camera to mostly click and shoot demonstrations, dharnas, and other agitations. A camera is a much better tool than ‘lathis’ to disperse agitating crowds, specially the leaders. Use of force makes them heroes, but if you click their photos, they just disperse, fearing police and intelligence follow-ups later. The SDO then added that quite a few of his other colleagues are using this technology. Good news for Sony, Nikon, Canon, Olympus, and others.

Incredible India! IBRAHIM AHMAD

[email protected]


LeisureTop 7 Happenings in 2011

Kolaveri et al... Social media has danced beautifully to the tunes of vibrant happenings in the country throughout 2011

COMPILED BY RUKHSAR SALEEMand www.vangal.com

[email protected]

#1: ICC World Cup 2011 (February-April, 2011)The ICC World Cup 2011 matches, including few critical ones like India vs Pakistan, India vs Australia, and especial-ly the historic final win in India vs Srilanka contest, brought in 16 lakh mentions on the overall internet space through the social media.

#2: Anna Hazare Protest—Phase 1 (First Fast, April 2011)Anna Hazare declared his indefinite fast at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, for the approval of Lokpal Bill in the Parliament got 54 lakh mentions. The protests and supporting rallies in

other cities also added to the trend.

#3: IPL 4 Tournament (April-May, 2011)Indian Premier League’s season 4, in line with 2 major countrywide events, maintained the momentum and brought in 23 lakh mentions for the cricket.

#4: Three Mumbai Blasts (July 2011)Bang at the start of second quarter of 2011, terror attacks in the Mumbai city turned out to be another trending topic on Twitter and other networking sites (8 lakh mentions)—

where people were discussing.

#5: Kerala Treasure (July 2011)Discovery of a vast treasure worth billions of dollars at the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Within a week, this happening trended and brought in 64,000 mentions.

#6: Formula 1 Grand Prix (November 2011)India’s first rendezvous with Formula 1 Grand Prix at

Buddh International Circuit, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India brought in 11.4 lakh mentions—with special praise for India’s F1 track with international standards standing

against many developed nations.

#7: Kolaveri Di (December 2011)‘Kolaveri Di’ video released through YouTube, featuring Dha-nush along with cast and crew of movie 3, directed by his wife Aishwarya, spread like a viral within a week’s time. It rocked the whole nation with its rustic tone and catchiness, and therefore continues to trend with 34 lakh mentions.

MSN Poll 2011


The Best and Worst of 2011The year-ending poll held by MSN India saw leading personalities from all walks of life firmly getting rooted in the minds of many Indians

Compiled by Kusum Kumari [email protected]

By now, we are well into 2012. But the memories of 2011 just refuse to fade. Before the end of the year, MSN India invited its users to vote for the best and the worst of 2011 under the categories: Bollywood, Sports, Leaders, and the Most Admired Women. It

received about 5.2 mn votes and we present here some of the findings.But, didn’t we carry something like this based on Google Zeitgist last

issue? Yes, we did. And this list actually supplements that. While Google data was based on ‘searches’ and hence indicated what is top-of-mind of internet users, that data probably is a better indicator of what the nation is collectively interested in. And that is based on a much larger sample of users, who use Google search.

However, the Google data just leaves it there. It does not say what people approve of and what they do not. So, a cricketer who brought glory for India by winning and a criminal who grabbed the headline because of some gruesome murder can be next to each other in that list. An Anna Hazare and a Poonam Pandey can be together! The MSN data is based on a poll that asked people what they like and dislike. It is less representative

than the Google data but a better reading into their minds as it brings in the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspect. MSN data is a vector, while Google data is a scalar, so

to say.

Bollywoodn Best Actor (Male): Rajeev Khandelwal, the famous TV actor, beats Shah Rukh Khan, the King, and emerged the winner in this category. Post Shaitan release, Khandelwal has impressed both critics and the Indian audience. Rec-ognition of this genuine talent is an encouraging factor.n Best Actor (Female): Everybody loves Katrina! She isn’t just a heart-throb of the Indian audience, but also of the search engines. She rules both the hearts and the web. Vidya Balan, with her talent and Indian beauty, closely follows Katrina. This intrepid actor—after The Dirty Picture—has brought all kinds of audience under her radar.n Worst Actor (Male): Undoubtedly, Himesh Reshamiya for long has been the undefeated ruler of this category. His nasal act and shabby, despondent looks have earned him a bad name. However the emergence of Abhishek Bachhan at #2 is an indigestible news for many.

n Worst Actor (Female): Esha Deol, a poor reflection of Dharmendra-Hema pair, has failed to make an impact, despite the unimaginable

leiSure


support behind her, hence is the undisputed queen of this category. She defeats the lesser known model-turned-actor Jacqueline Fernandez.n Best Film: Salman for long has entertained the Indian audience with his jhatkas and spiced up dialogue deliveries. He not only knows how to woo women but also spectators. His Bodyguard was voted the winner, beating Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.n Worst Film: Who thought Mausam, a movie made under the watchful eyes of immensely talented Pankaj Kapur, will fail to impress even a single soul with the heart. Voted as the worst movie, it stood out for a disappointing romance and acting. Ra One at #2 and Mausam were birds of the same feather and flocked together with a disastrous box office.

SPORTSn Indian Sportsman of the Year: MS Dhoni is not just the king of ads but also of avid Indian cricket fanatics. Under his leadership, India fulfilled its long cherished dream—World Cup 2011. Closely following him is Abhinav Bindra, who through his undeterred focus snatched gold at Olympics and inked history. These history makers gave Indians an occasion for celebration. Abhi-nav Bindra who gave India its first individual Olympic Gold was a fairly close second—ahead of cricketers.n Best Indian Sporting Event: None can detach Indians from

cricket. Controversies come and go, but cricket has sustained and increased its number of fans like never before, especially after the World Cup 2011 event. This unforgettable moment was a dream come true for all of us. Similarly, Asian Hockey Championship at #2 rejuvenated our national sport.n Most Followed Indian Sport: Undoubtedly, cricket is the ruler of this category. Indians follow cricket like a shadow, with the coming of smartphones following seems more easier and the bond has become stronger.

LeadersIndians cannot live without dis-cussing politics—even a paan-wallah has a political view. What media and other search engines failed to gauge was the rising popularity of a man, who is being chased by law and the civil society since long.n Most Admired Indian Leader: Three completely different types of leaders occupying the top slots, in a way, summarized the challenge of Indian democracy. The contro-versial, completely-non-ac-ceptable-to-many politician with an incomparable track record as an administrator, Narendra Modi was the top choice. Rahul Gandhi, more with just the family

name and age on his side, with lim-ited view on national and interna-tional issues, was a close second. An extremely popular anti-estab-lishment face, Anna Hazare, is not thought of as a great leader by many. He managed to get less than half the votes drawn by Rahul busting the myth that the youth support him. Most MSN (internet) users in India are young.

WomenVery few women leaders have stood out in the current Indian politics. Hence some similar figures have re-emerged in this category.n Most Admired Indian Female Icon: Kiran Bedi inspired a whole generation of women, who left their thresholds to join the public space as bureaucrats, police officers, etc. Undoubtedly, she was an icon and is still considered an icon. Sonia Gandhi at #2, too, inspires entire India for her politi-cal skills. n

Narendra Modi Katrina Kaif Kiran Bedi Salman Khan


Stopped FDI in Retail? Here comes E-commerce

Nothing, not even politicians, can stop an idea whose time has come. At best, they can make it enter through a different door. Power to the Indian consumer is one such idea. Allowing FDI

in retail, which a section of the political parties have successfully stalled, was just a euphemism for that.

The real need of the hour is to free the Indian consumer from the clutches of the owners of the local kirana stores—projected by some political parties as hapless, vulnerable, and bechara, but in reality, they are just the opposite. Not only do they exploit consumers, they are powerful enough to stall any government move that affects them negatively—be it FDI in retail or the demolition of illegal buildings in many cities. As popular economic columnist Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar put it after they successfully lobbied to stall the FDI in retail move by the government, the aam bania is more powerful than the aam aadmi.

But the rejoice has to be short-lived. FDI in retail—the way we traditionally understand it—may have got delayed, thanks to some of the political parties, but the competition in retail is hotting up. E-commerce, the competition from which is not under the radar of these stores, is real. In areas such as books, gifts, stationery, electronics, and garments, it has already captured the mindshare of the discerning consumer. It is not before long that the battle would move to grocery—the traditional turf of the kirana stores. The Indian consumer is today not just familiar but also comfortable with the idea of online retail. And, once there is an option for him/her to buy the highly commoditized

grocery online—most likely at a discount—there is very little reason for him/her not to jump into it. Someone who can buy an electronics item worth `10,000 online without hesitation, can surely buy a packet of Aashirvaad Atta or a can of Saffola Oil that way.

The consumer is now more than ready. The problem is still in the supply side. But some enterprising companies are already at it, trying to build hyper-local delivery models. The rest of the things—not very different from any other e-commerce business—are already in place. At present, I am aware of companies planning to start such models in West Delhi, Noida, parts of Chennai, Hyderabad, and Jaipur. I am sure at least some of them will be successful. And even if they fail at the first attempt, I am sure by the end of this year, we would see the model operating successfully in some parts of India. After that, as we have seen in the other areas of e-commerce, the growth would be exponential, nay, explosive.

What is worse for those trying to stop it, there could still be FDI in these ventures. Online retail is not defined as retail by today’s government definition. I am not sure if it would be legal and/or advisable for Target or Walmart to get into retail through this route. But we are supposedly trying to stop FDI in retail. Right? Not Walmart and Target.

In fact, I will not be surprised if some of the more progressive kirana stores would grab the opportunity to serve as the delivery arms of large e-commerce companies in some localities. They may lose the power to harass consumers, but may well make more money that way.

Afterthought

Shyamanuja DasThe author is Editor of Dataquest [email protected]

RNI No. 40432/82DL(S)17/3159/2012-14

Licensed to Post WPP. U(SE)26/2009-2011

Posting Date: 10&11 and 25&26 of every month. Posted at Lodi Road HPO.

Documents

Dataquest January 31, 2012