Dataquest Feb

CURBING INDIA’S PROBLEM OF ELECTRICITY THEFTS p. 17

BETTING BIG ON HYBRID CLOUD p. 64

BANKING THE UNBANKED p. 68

`60

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VOL XXXIII No 04 I FEBRUARY 28, 2015

THE BUSINESS OF INFOTECH

Banking Goes Social

Indian banks are actively leveraging social ciiall kee platforms to build communities and take banking to a different level >>20

Impact of mobility on financial services >>32

Boosting collaboration with ESN >>36

PERSPECTIVE HARNATH BABU CIO, AVIVA LIFE INSURANCE

CASE STUDY THOMSON THOMAS CIO, HDFC LIFE

76 pages including cover

Special Subscription offer on page 60

We

Succeed When Redundancy

Fails

FEBRUARY 28, 2015

20 I

TALKING POINT

IBM’s Newest Mainframe z13 to Handle ‘Trending’ Workloads

40

Banking Goes Social

—VISWANATH RAMASWAMY Country Leader, Server Solutions (POWER & Mainframe) IBM India

IT-led big data projects always fail

44

—STEPHEN BROBST Chief Technology Officer, Teradata Corporation

Advanced Technologies to Fight New Age Crimes

52

COVER STORY

—RAVIKUMAR SREEDHARAN Vice President, Application Development and Maintenance (ADM), Unisys India

SECTIONS

REGULAR

Indian banks ks s ar are re actively leveraging social platforms to build communities and...

REGULAR

INDUSTRY

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Edit

ENTERPRISE

07

DQ Team

74

Last Matter

LEISURE

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A CyberMedia Publication

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CONTENTS EVENT 47

SMI : The Convergence Makes the Difference

INDUSTRY

ENTERPRISE

08

Short Takes

68

Banking the Unbanked

17

How Smart Grids can Curb India’s Perennial Problem of Electricity Thefts?

70

More Analytics, Better Decisions, Less Intuition

26

How Social, Mobile, and Online Trends are Reshaping the Indian Insurance Segment

32

The Impact of Enterprise Mobility on the Financial Services Industry

36

HDFC Life Shows how Enterprise Social Networks can Boost Collaboration

38

Banking on Data

55

Why SMBs are Taking to Cloud Computing

58

Why Your Antivirus is Not Enough Anymore

62

Designing with Big Data

64

Betting Big on Hybrid Cloud

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A Cy CyberMedia C ybe yyb berrM rMe Me M ed dia di iia a Publication Publ blilliicat b ic ca cat atiio at ion on o n

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February Feb F ebrua ru ua u ary ary ry 28, 28, 2015 28 2015 20 015

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Srikanth RP [email protected]

How Indian BFSI firms are leading the next wave of digital innovation

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s a country with the largest youth population, India is undoubtedly one of the biggest markets for every firm. If you are a financial services firm, you would want to influence this segment by being present in places where the youth is present, or be an integral part of their lives by embedding yourself in the platforms that the youth uses. This includes platforms like Facebook, which is used by a majority of young Indians. Not surprisingly, Indian banking players are leading the charge of digital innovation by integrating social mediums with their banking services. ICICI Bank, for example, recently launched a Twitter-based banking service, which enables its customers to transfer money to anyone in the country who has a Twitter account. Incidentally, ICICI Bank was also the first to launch a Facebook application that allows customers to perform banking transactions directly from the social network. Kotak Mahindra Bank too has launched Jifi Saver, a social banking account that can be managed using Twitter and Facebook. Kotak was also the first bank to launch KayPay, the world’s first bank agnostic payment product for Facebook users to send money to each other instantly. Insurance players are also extensively using tablets to enable their surveyors to instantly capture images, fill in the necessary information and immediately sync information to a central server to process a claim. ICICI Lombard, has gone one step ahead, and has launched an app that empowers customers to intimate a claim of their vehicle through their mobile phones. Customers can click pictures of the damaged parts and send it to the firm and record and upload the incident description in his/her voice through the app. This is an example of innovation as it ensures that customers collect necessary evidence in terms of images and audio records and transmit it instantaneously to the claims office, thus ensuring faster claim process. As financial products and services are quickly getting commoditized, firms in the BFSI sector are in a hotly contested race to win the mindshare of the customer. For example, understanding that working individuals cannot be restricted to the fixed working hours of a bank, ICICI has setup an automated electronic branches that allow customers the flexibility to transact at the time of their convenience for daily banking needs. Indian banks like ING Vysya Bank are also experimenting with new technologies like gamification, wearable technologies and iBeacons to enhance customer experience. By capitalizing on two big emerging trends - mobility and social, Indian BFSI firms have smartly exploited them to their advantage. As banks cannot be present at all physical locations, they are using the reach of social platforms like Facebook and the ubiquitous mobile device to be always accessible to the customer. A quote by late Management guru and respected thinker, CK Prahlad best embodies the line of thinking by Indian firms, ‘Strategy is about stretching limited resources to fulfill ambitious aspirations.’ By using technology to deliver personalized experiences, Indian BFSI firms have truly changed the economics of branch banking. For example, who would have thought years back that a bank will come to your home to open your account. Times are changing fast, and who knows, in a few years from now, a bank may not even have a physical address.

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EDITORIAL

EDITOR AND GROUP EDITOR: Ibrahim Ahmad EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Srikanth RP ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Shrikanth G (Chennai),

SENIOR EDITORIAL CO-ORDINATOR: Manishika Miglani ASST MANAGER DESIGN: Bhagbat Pattnayak, Harnek Singh, Pramod S Rawat EDITORIAL ADVISOR: Prasanto Kumar Roy

SR ASST EDITOR: Onkar Sharma (Gurgaon), Smita Vasudevan (Bengaluru)

COVER DESIGN: Pramod S Rawat

ASST EDITOR: Charu Murgai, Ruchika Goel, Prerna Sharma, Jasmine Kohli

EDITOR-AT-LARGE: Ed Nair

BUSINESS HEAD OF SALES & MARKETING Satish Gupta ([email protected]) AGM-Sales (Events): Sudheer G ([email protected]) Sales NORTH Arvind Razdan Subhadeep Sen SOUTH & WEST Pradeep Kumar EAST Sandeep Roy Chowdhuri INTERNATIONAL Arvind Razdan Marketing Sidharth Malhotra, Kuldeep Khatana Events & Communities MANAGER: Debabrata T Joshi ASST. MANAGER: Prerna Chauhan Operations GENERAL MANAGER: CP Kalra MANAGER: Ashok K Shared Services SR VICE PRESIDENT: Rachna Garga PRINT SERVICES: T Srirengan CIRCULATION & SUBSCRIPTION: C Ramachandran, Jagdeep Khanna Raghavendra S, Raju Salve SR MANAGER AUDIENCE SERVICE: Sarita Shridhar MANAGER MIS & DATABASE: Ravi Kant Kumar SR PRESS COORDINATOR: Harak Singh Ramola

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Dataquest (not affiliated with Dataquest Inc., a division of Gartner Group, USA), is printed and published by Pradeep Gupta, on behalf of Cyber Media (India) Ltd, printed at M/s Karan Printers, F 29/2, Phase II, Okhla Industrial Area, New Delhi, published at D-74, Panchsheel Enclave New Delhi 110017, India. Editor Ibrahim Ahmad. Distributors in India by IBH Books & Magazines Dist. Pvt. Ltd, Mumbai. Subscription (Inland): `1500 (24 issues), `3000 (48 issues) Subscription (Foreign): US $145 (SAARC Countries), US $75 (Rest of the world) By Airmail. (For subscription queries contact : [email protected]) Dataquest does not claim any responsibility to return unsolicited articles or photographs unless accompanied by adequate returnpostage. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publishers.

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Compiled by Ruchika Goel [email protected]

Marten Pieters to Step Down as Vodafone India CEO Sunil Sood Appointed as Successor

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he Board of Vodafone India announced that Marten Pieters will be stepping down as Managing Director and Chief Executive of Vodafone India with effect from April 1, 2015 and will be succeeded by the Vodafone India Chief Operating Officer, Sunil Sood. After that Pieters will continue to remain on the Board of Vodafone India in a non-executive capacity. Marten Pieters was appointed as Vodafone India Managing Director and Chief Executive in February 2009 after an international telecommunications career which included board-level roles with KPN, Celtel, and Millicom. Under his leadership, Vodafone India doubled revenues, added more than 100 mn customers, increased market share and launched data services used by more than 57 mn customers. The longest-serving Chief Executive of an Indian telecommunications company, he has led Vodafone India’s participation in all spectrum auctions since 2009. Pieters was appointed as the Chairman of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) in 2014. Pieters will be succeeded as Vodafone India Managing Director and Chief Executive by Sunil Sood. Sood is currently the Vodafone India Chief Operating Officer. He is responsible for day-to-day operations and P&L management together with new business development initiatives

including the launch and expansion of mobile commerce activities. Sood joined Vodafone India’s predecessor business, Hutch, in 2000 and has held roles leading the company’s operations in Gujarat, Kolkata and Chennai. He had previously worked for Pepsi in a range of Indian and international leadership roles.

PayPal Extends ‘Start Tank’ Incubation Challenge to Student Entrepreneurs

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n an effort to promote a culture of entrepreneurship among the student community, PayPal has opened the doors of its Start Tank incubator for students aspiring to start their own enterprise. The incubation center in Chennai, which hosts and grooms tech startup companies, now encourages student entrepreneurs from across top universities to pitch their tech ideas and turn them into reality.

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For the first time since its inception in 2013, PayPal’s Start Tank rolled out its incubation challenge at the recently held Entrepreneurship Conclave and Startup Hive at IIT-Madras and selected two teams from the competition. They will now have a direct entry into the finals of the incubation challenge to be conducted later this year, and upon selection, get incubated at Start Tank. The winning idea of ‘delivering logistics via drones’ was pitched by a team of MTech students from IIT-M and the runner-up idea ‘pushing dynamic ads into mobile games in place of the obtrusive banner ads’ came from a team of dual degree students, also from IIT-M. Several promising concepts such as crowdfunding to support the underprivileged, 3D printing & distribution, ‘green garbage’ waste management, among many others, were also presented by students from several leading universities in the country. A CyberMedia Publication

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INDUSTRY | SHORT TAKES

Spice Group Announces Investment of `500 crore to Build Manufacturing Unit in UP

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aking forward the Government of India’s Make in India campaign, Spice Group, a leading mobile Internet conglomerate announced an investment of `500 crore to set up a manufacturing unit in Uttar Pradesh. At the occasion, the company also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government of Uttar Pradesh for setting up the manufacturing unit in the state. The manufacturing unit will bolster the company’s strategy to introduce affordable mobile Internet devices in India through domestic manufacturing, thus catering to a larger market by offering best technology at most affordable prices. Under the Memorandum of Understanding, the Government of UP will support Spice Group in establishing the facility in the State of Uttar

Pradesh in a time bound manner and facilitate the necessary infrastructure, ecosystem and incentives under various schemes announced by the State and Central Government. Commenting on the announcement, Dilip Modi, Chairman, Spice Group said, “We are delighted to announce our investment plans to set up a mobile manufacturing unit in Uttar Pradesh with the support of the Government of Uttar Pradesh. With a local manufacturing plant, Spice Group can achieve its vision to create affordable and high technology mobile products for a larger audience. Uttar Pradesh has had a strong connection with our group, ever since we set up the country’s first photocopier manufacturing plant in the state. We would like to thank the Government of Uttar Pradesh for once again extending their support in expanding our company’s business plans.”

VMware Strengthens its Leadership Team in India

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Mware announced key changes to its leadership team in India with the appointment of Sundar Balasubramanian as the Senior Director for General Business for VMware India. Balasubramanian will be responsible for partners and alliances, and will also lead the commercial sales business for VMware in India. Balasubramanian joins VMware from IBM where he last served as the Country Manager, channels, SI & ISV, systems & technology group. A seasoned industry veteran with over 21 years’ experience, Balasubramanian has in the past held senior leadership roles with EMC and Microsoft. VMware also announced the promotion of Balaji Rao to Senior Director Enterprise and government sales to help enterprise and government organizations transition to the mobile cloud era. Having spent over 5 years with VMware, Rao has played a crucial role in enabling enterprise customers to embark on their virtualization journey in India. Sangeeta Gundala takes on a new role as the India business leader for AirWatch (that VMware acquired in January 2014) to help address the fast growing enterprise mobility opportunity in India. Gundala till recently held the position of Director, commercial sales at VMware India. “The past year was an important year for VMware in |

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India. It was a year of change and transformation for us as we embarked on our next phase of growth,” said Arun Parameswaran, Managing Director, VMware India. “These appointments will help strengthen the VMware leadership team in India as we look to aggressively capitalize on the enormous opportunities that mobile-cloud era offers us in the region,” he added.

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Dell OEM Solutions Help Agmatel Reduce Total Cost of Ownership for Kiosks by 30%

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ell announced that it has successfully deployed Dell OEM solutions for Agmatel, one of the leading provider of kiosks to the public sector in India. This implementation has helped Agmatel reduce their total cost of ownership by 30% along with offering speedy delivery. Like other authorities, India is rolling out self-service kiosks at many sites, including government agencies, to deliver a faster and more efficient service to citizens. Looking at the growing demand for self-service kiosks, Agmatel also decided to develop its own range of kiosk solutions. For this the company ordered PCs from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in China and Taiwan to power its kiosk terminals but problems started arising when the PCs came unsupported, leaving Agmatel with the substantial cost of servicing hardware warranties in the field. Also, because the PCs were manufactured outside of India, they had to undergo stringent testing by o
cials before they could enter the country. Owing to Dell’s unremitting supply of technology to public sector clients for many years, Agmatel decided to switch to Dell OEM Solutions and Intel processors to help solve its challenges. The organization selected Dell OEM OptiPlex 7010 and 9020 PCs with Intel Core™ i3 dual-core processors to support its kiosk terminals. Also,

where kiosks were permanently connected to a network, Agmatel chose Dell Wyse thin clients. Using Dell’s solution, Agmatel was able to offer speedy delivery which further reduced their total cost of ownership of kiosk solution by 30%. Moreover, Dell also provided them immense support across India so that if they need to resolve a technical issue, Dell will send an engineer with a replacement part immediately without having Agmatel incur any cost in spares or sending out their own engineers.

Panasonic Joins Hands with Reliance Communications to Introduce Cloud-Based Video Surveillance

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anasonic India, in association with Reliance Communications (RCOM), launched Cloud Video Intelli-Surveillance—an end-to-end video surveillance solution with advanced analytics for the enterprise segment. Combining Panasonic’s global domain expertise in surveillance cameras and video analytics with Reliance’s countrywide network and datacenter infrastructure, cloud video intellisurveillance is designed as an integrated solution to bring advanced surveillance within easy reach to enterprises across the country. RCOM’s enterprise business arm will take this solution to the market, leveraging its deep relationship with over 39,000 businesses across the country. Providing physical security to humans and assets, especially in the context of prevailing social environment, is a significant challenge for enterprises, particularly those with distributed operations. It is prompting organizations, authorities, and individuals to devise effective response 12

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mechanisms today. Keeping these concerns in view, Panasonic, along with Reliance Communications, is amongst the pioneers to provide 24*7 access to video footage on any connected device: PC, Mac, Mobile phone and Tablet, while being on the move. The solution will find its use in almost all verticals, particularly hospitality, education, retail, healthcare, and BFSI (Banking, Financial Services & Insurance) sectors. Cloud video intelli-surveillance is packed with a host of offerings, such as easy scheduling, managing IP cameras fully in the cloud and advanced cloud video analytics like Human Detection, Tripwire and many more. This solution also offers various advantages such as alerts, API usage, user management and HD-like image quality. With apps available for iOS & android devices, one can easily access their cameras on-the-go. This allows for seamless checking of live streams and footage or receiving push notifications during the course of an event. A CyberMedia Publication

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Escorts Slashes Financial Reporting Time by 50% with Oracle

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scorts announced that they have implemented Oracle E-Business Suite. The company consolidated four ERP systems onto Oracle E-Business Suite to make business processes more efficient and to increase revenue opportunities. „ By implementing a standardized ERP platform, Escorts has accelerated its supply chain process and improved decision-making with enhanced data transparency across its four lines of business. „ The company slashed financial reporting time by 50% and automated supply chain operations to enable

faster responses to rapidly changing market demands. Furthermore, Escorts has significantly improved its inventory and warehouse management, which has increased revenue opportunities and enhanced customer satisfaction. „ Prior to this implementation, each of Escorts’ four lines of business used separate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, which resulted in disparate operating and control processes and created difficulties for management to gain enterprise-wide visibility for taking informed business decisions. It was a cumbersome and time-consuming process to analyze the company’s profitability drivers. „ With disparate legacy ERP systems, Escorts could not close books and generate financial reports until the tenth day of the following month, as all four divisions had different chart-of-account masters and business-specific methods for handling financial data. „ Through the implementation of Oracle Financials, Escorts implemented a group wide, shared-services business model to centrally manage all financial activities, including accounting (recievable, payable, general ledger), taxes, and fixed assets. Escorts can now complete their financial reporting on the fifth day rather than the tenth day of the next month by using the integrated workflow and automated data consolidation.

Dr Anirban Basu Elected President of Computer Society of India

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r Anirban Basu has been elected as the President of Computer Society of India (CSI) for the period 2016-2017. He will serve as the Vice President of CSI from April 2015 to 2016 before assuming the office of the President. Formed in 1965, CSI is the largest and oldest body of IT professionals and has been instrumental in guiding the Indian IT industry down the right path since its formative years. Today, CSI has 73 chapters all over India, over 500 student branches, and more than 100,000 members including India’s most famous IT industry leaders, brilliant scientists, and dedicated academicians. Dr Basu is a dynamic executive based in Bengaluru with more than 35 years experience in academia, advanced research & development, commercial software industry, consultancy and corporate training. |

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Mark Ablett Joins Hitachi Data Systems

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itachi Data Systems announced the appointment of Mark Ablett as Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific. He will be responsible for providing strategic direction and leading the company in its drive to capitalize on the fast growing opportunities in the Asia Pacific region, boosting revenue growth and expanding the business. Ablett brings over 20 years of regional sales and leadership experience in the information technology industry to HDS. He is a proven business leader with a wealth of enterprise sales and leadership expertise. Before joining HDS, Ablett was Vice President of Australasia at Juniper Networks responsible for revenue growth and profitability across the region. “Mark joins us at an exciting time of growth and transformation at HDS as we continue to expand the breadth of solutions we offer to our customers and partners in the region,” said Michael

Cremen, Executive Vice President, Global Sales, Hitachi Data Systems. “His expansive industry knowledge and rich experience in the Asia Pacific market will enhance the impact of our teams and expand the value we provide to customers. Under Mark’s leadership, the opportunities for HDS are tremendous.” “Hitachi Data Systems is synonymous with providing the world’s best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions to a variety of customers across the industry sectors,” said Ablett. “The Asia Pacific market is growing fast and companies are keen to capitalize on opportunities, leveraging valuable information and insights powered by technology. I am excited to lead the HDS team to deliver highly innovative solutions to our customers, strengthen our partnerships with leading technology providers and cement our thought-leadership position in the industry. I look forward to driving the Asia Pacific business to even greater heights in the years to come.”

Twitter Appoints Taranjeet Singh as Business Head for India

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witter has appointed Taranjeet Singh as Head of Sales for its India operations and will be based in its Gurgaon office. Singh’s main responsibilities will be to increase the commercial opportunities for Twitter in India and to work closely with brands and agencies to maximize the value of real-time marketing on the world’s largest platform for live, public conversations. Commenting on the appointment, Parminder Singh, Twitter’s Managing Director for Southeast Asia, India and Middle East and North Africa said, “India is a very important market for us—we’ve seen strong usage of our platform across the board last year and now is a great time to increase our local sales presence by bringing in Singh as our Country Business Head. We’ve seen growing momentum from brands and 14

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agencies to use Twitter to connect with their audiences in real-time for major events as well as everyday moments in India. Taranjeet will lead our partnership with brands for maximize their creativity and deepening their customer engagement on our platform to take our sales business to the next level in ndia.” Singh has more than 19 years of sales nd business development experience nd a comprehensive understanding of e media industry. In his last assignment the Sales Director, South Asia for BBC dvertising, he was responsible for revenue and business strategy for BBC World News and the website www. bbc.com. Prior to joining the BBC, Taranjeet held various positions at Outlook Publishing, including heading advertising sales and business development in Northern India.

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Internet Grows to 284 mn Domain Names in the Third Quarter of 2014

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eriSign, a global leader in domain names and Internet security, announced 4 mn domain names were added to the Internet in the third quarter of 2014, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 284 mn worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Sept. 30, 2014, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief. The increase of 4 mn domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.6% over the second quarter of 2014. Worldwide registrations have grown by 18.1 mn, or 6.8%, YoY.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the third quarter of 2014, reaching a combined total of 130.0 mn domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net. This represents a 3.3% increase year over year. As of Sept. 30, 2014, the base of registered names in .com equaled 114.9 mn names, while .net equaled 15.1 mn names. New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.7 mn during the third quarter of 2014. In the third quarter of 2013, new .com and .net registrations totaled 8.3 mn.

IESA Signs MoU with Government of UP to Promote ESDM Industry Ecosystem

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ESA announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government of Uttar Pradesh for promoting ESDM industry ecosystem in the state. Under the MoU, IESA will assist the Uttar Pradesh Government in: „ Fostering the Start-up Ecosystem and Indigenous Product Development: Setting up ESDM incubation centers in the state at mutually identified locations „ Development of Strategic Roadmap: Development of strategic roadmap for ESDM industry in the state „ Cluster Development: Preparation of detailed project reports for the brownfield/greenfield EMC at identified locations „ Investment Promotion: Setting up international desks for the state in mutually identified foreign locations „ Talent/Skill Development: IESA has already provided immense support to various state governments like Government of Maharashtra and Odisha by proposing strategic roadmaps and attaining faster approval of EMC Applications, thereby catalyzing the economic growth of the states. The “Government of Uttar Pradesh has i d e n t i f i e d ESDM as a focus to ensure economic growth, enhance employment opportunities, promote indigenous product development and safeguard investors’ business intention in the state. Along with IESA, we are confident to create 16

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a favourable ecosystem for electronics manufacturing in the state and build Uttar Pradesh for a brighter tomorrow,” said Shri Jiwesh Nandan, IAS, Principal Secretary, Department of IT and Electronics, Government of Uttar Pradesh.

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Srikanth RP [email protected]

How Smart Grids can Curb India’s Perennial Problem of Electricity Thefts? Power threats are making India lose $16.2 bn per year. In such a scenario, there has been a strong push for the deployment of smart meter and smart grid technologies

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ndia has always been a power deficit country, and has consistently suffered grid failures and power blackouts. The wakeup call came in July 2012, when the country faced the largest power outage affecting 22 states and 620 mn people. The outage was a wakeup call to modernize the power infrastructure in the country. According to industry estimates, nearly |

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30% of the power generated in India is wasted in transmission and distribution primarily because of leakages and theft. A new study published by the Northeast Group, estimates that theft costs the Indian power sector $16.2 bn per year. “India’s energy demand is rising very fast. In order to meet this rising demand, there www.dqindia.com

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by the major players on smart metering and distribution automation. “We believe smart metering is a critical step required to address this problem. Smart two-way communicating meters—also referred to in the industry as ‘advanced metering infrastructure’ or ‘AMI’—can help India to begin to alleviate the electricity theft problem. These meters can pinpoint where theft may be occurring and have tamper alerts so utilities know when there are issues,” says Gardner. Gardner believes that in the near term, the environment may be more challenging, as India’s power sector is fragmented and complicated. Each state has its own regulatory commission, and industry structure and regulations can vary widely from state to state as utilities are in dynamic states of reform, unbundling, and privatization. Hence, understanding the unique dynamics of each state is important. While each state is different, Gardner believes that the CAN TECHNOLOGY COME TO THE RESCUE? largest opportunities for smart grid The Indian government infrastructure lies in Maharashtra, believes it can and has already Karnataka, Delhi, Gujarat, West committed billions of dollars Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, in funding for smart grid due to the best combination of infrastructure and cumulative positive regulatory frameworks, spending is forecasted at $21.6 GOVERNMENT’S market size and potential benefits bn over the period 2015-2025 from smart grids. according to Northeast Group. COMMITMENT TO That said, with a willing In line with this objective, there ADDRESS INDIA’S POWER government, there is no doubt has been a strong push for the that the medium-to-long term deployment of smart meters SECTOR CHALLENGES smart grid opportunities in and smart grid technologies. ENSURES STRONG SMART India are enormous. “Overall, The Ministry of Power has India is one of the most unique already approved pilots for GRID MARKET GROWTH smart grid markets in the world, smart grids in the country and THROUGHOUT THE combining among the world’s private players like Tata Power, largest market potential and high Reliance Infrastructure are COMING DECADE distribution and GDP growth already running smart meter and rates with complicated regulatory smart grid led projects. structures and low per-capita In November 2014, Prime Minister Modi announced $4 bn in funding for smart income and consumption. Challenges are certain to metering programs. Additionally, over $8 bn is available persist, but the government’s commitment to addressing for loss reduction programs and dozens of projects are India’s significant power sector challenges by investing in now underway across 29 states. The government is also smart grid infrastructure ensures strong smart grid market helping to drive the efforts by developing 14 smart grid growth throughout the coming decade,” opines Gardner. With the central government showing intent with pilot projects across the country through the India Smart billions of dollars in promised funding for smart grid Grid Task Force. With India’s electricity demand growth set to exceed infrastructure, India represents the largest long-term 7% per year over the next decade, there is a lot of focus smart grid opportunity in the world. needs to be sufficient reliable power infrastructure in place. Unfortunately, the high rate of electricity theft creates a situation where the utilities are not financially sustainable. The utilities fail to collect revenue and as a result, they do not have the necessary funding to invest in their grids,” states Ben Gardner, President of Northeast Group. Gardner says that nationally, total transmission and distribution losses approach 23% and some states’ losses exceed 50%, which makes most Indian utilities financially unsustainable. The firm estimates that India loses more money to theft than any other country in the world. The state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, the financial capital of India, alone loses $2.8 bn per year, more than all but eight countries in the world.

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Srikanth RP [email protected]

How Emerging Technologies are Transforming the Banking Sector From leveraging social networks for forging bonds with youngsters, using tablets to open new accounts quickly and experimenting with wearables, Indian banks are wooing customers with a slew of innovative offerings powered by technology

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hen a close friend met up with an accident, a thought quickly raced through the mind of Avinash Joshi, a 16-yearold college going happy-go-lucky kid. As he waited anxiously outside the operating room, his first thought was of raising money quickly for taking care of the hospital expenses. With20

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out wasting any time, he coolly took out his smartphone from his pocket, and quickly reached out to his Facebook friends to help in pooling money. Within a time period of just one hour, Avinash had enough money in his account to help in paying the initial expenses. It is important to note here that none of Avinash’s friends had Avinash’s account number or bank branch or an IFSC A CyberMedia Publication

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code—they were just friends with Avinash on his Facebook friend list. Till a few years back, this scenario would have been impossible to comprehend or even think. Today, this is a reality—thanks to initiatives by private banks like ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank. Indian banks today have realized the immense potential of social media platforms like Facebook. Facebook has more than 112 mn users in India, the largest after the US. And what better way to engage with end customers than be at a place where customers are already present. Facebook gives banks one more channel to engage in real conversations with fans and prospective customers. SOCIALIZING BANKING

Recognizing this trend, India’s largest private sector bank, ICICI Bank, was the first to launch a Facebook application that allowed its customers to view their savings account details and statement on Facebook, and also order a cheque book and upgrade their debit cards, while being on the social media platform. The bank has followed this up by launching a slew of other applications. A year later, it created ‘Pockets’—a Facebook application that allows one to make a payment to friend, recharge prepaid mobile or book movie tickets. The best part is that one does not need to know the bank account details of their friends to make a transfer. One can also carry out non-financial transactions such

as accessing a mini statement of savings bank account or order a cheque book. More recently, in January 2015, the bank launched ‘icicibankpay’, an initiative that enables ICICI Bank customers to transfer money to anyone in the country who has a Twitter account, check account balance, view last three transactions, and recharge prepaid mobile. “With the growing prominence of social media in everyday life, we believe our customers would be delighted to have yet another avenue which allows them to bank while they are on social media. Now, ‘icicibankpay’ will help our customers to execute banking transactions while they are socializing on Twitter,” says Rajiv Sabharwal, Executive Director, ICICI Bank. Any ICICI Bank savings account customer, who has a mobile number registered with the bank and has a Twitter account, can access the facilities of ‘icicibankpay’. The customer can send money to anyone in India even if the recipient does not have an ICICI Bank savings account. Similarly, Kotak Mahindra Bank has launched KayPay, the world’s first bank agnostic payment product for Facebook users to send money to each other instantly. Using this facility, millions of bank account holders can now transfer money to each other at any hour of the day or night, without needing net banking, or knowing various bank account related details of the payee. KayPay enables over 250 mn Indian bank account holders transfer funds

With the growing prominence of social media in everyday life, we believe our customers would be delighted to have yet another avenue which allows them to bank while they are on social media —Rajiv Sabharwal Executive Director, ICICI Bank

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Interesting Technology Initiatives Undertaken By Major Indian Banks Name of Bank

Technology Initiatives

ICICI Bank

‘Pockets’—a Facebook application that allows one to make a payment to friend, recharge prepaid mobile or book movie tickets ‘icicibankpay’, an initiative that enables ICICI Bank customers to transfer money to anyone in the country who has a Twitter account Tab Banking—an initiative that allows customers to open a ICICI bank account from the comfort of their home as relationship managers use a tablet for capturing KYC requirements Electronic Branches—an initiative that allows customers the flexibility to transact at the time of their convenience for daily banking needs with the help of various automated devices and kiosks Cardless Cash Withdrawal—a service that allows customers to transfer money from their account to anyone in India with a mobile number, and without a debit card NFC-enabled debit and credit cards—an initiative that enables customers to make electronic payments by just waving the cards near the merchant terminal instead of swiping them

Kotak Mahindra Bank

KayPay, the world’s first bank agnostic payment product for Facebook users to send money to each other instantly Jifi, an integrated social banking account wherein customers can receive account updates on Twitter Mail Money—a product that allows customers to mail money by just knowing the email ID and the mobile number of the beneficiary

IndusInd Bank

Video Branch—an offering that enables customers to do a video conference with bank staff

ING Vysya Bank

Wearables—The bank is experimenting with wearables such as smart watches to enable customers to easily access their accounts. The bank is also looking at emerging technologies such as Beacons to improve customer experience

The Non Resident Indian (NRI) customers in particular have found the video branch to be a very convenient means of reaching out to the bank from their country of residence —Paul Abraham Chief Operating Officer, IndusInd Bank

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As most people already spend time on Facebook, they can make small payments within Facebook without the need of logging into net banking —Deepak Sharma Executive VP and Head of Digital Initiatives, Kotak Mahindra

to each other instantly by just choosing recipients from their Facebook friends list. Explaining the idea behind launching this service, Deepak Sharma, Executive VP and Head of Digital Initiatives says, “We wanted to create a platform that would reduce the flow of cash between people— especially for smaller transactions, as many of us find it a cumbersome task to pay in cash. We believed if we could create a product which is frictionless and easy to use, then we would make life simpler for Indians. As most people already spend time on Facebook, they can make small payments within Facebook without the need of logging into net banking.” The product has been a huge success, as Kotak has done three essential things right. It has made transactions real time. Secondly, transactions are possible from any bank to any bank, and thirdly, users do not need to know the bank account details of the person they are transferring money to. Kotak Mahindra Bank has also launched Jifi, an integrated social banking account wherein customers can receive account updates on Twitter. Designed to fit into the social networking ecosystem, Jifi’s loyalty point programme encourages high level of interactivity among account holders. Customers can earn transactional loyalty points for specific banking activities, and social loyalty points for inviting and adding friends to the Jifi network, liking/commenting on Facebook, etc. Further, |

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each referral can also earn them social loyalty points. These points can be redeemed for offers and can also be transferred to friends who are part of their Jifi network. Kotak Mahindra Bank recognizes that if this trend catches on, banking can also become a viral activity with peers recommending the bank. BANKING COMES TO YOUR HOME

The availability of mobile phones with good connectivity options have created attractive opportunities for banking players to provide quick access to many people due to ease of usage and low cost of delivery. To enable greater customer convenience, ICICI has launched ‘Tab Banking’ that allows customers to open a ICICI bank account from the comfort of their home. Through ‘Tab Banking’, the bank aims to bring about significant changes in the customer’s first engagement with it; that of opening an account with it. With this initiative, the bank’s relationship managers have been equipped with high end tablets, 3G network capabilities, and a 5 MP camera. All KYC (Know your Customer) documents and photographs are now being captured through the tablet’s camera and uploaded along with customer details, making the entire account opening process hassle-free for the customer. “Today, a customer’s new bank account is fully ready for transacting within a few hours. Moreover, they can www.dqindia.com

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Using smart watches, customers can simply speak to the watch to fetch their account balance status and we are currently testing the service with a closed group of users. —Ashwin Khorana CTO, ING Vysya Bank

view/verify account opening details being entered into the system thereby giving them more confidence,” says Sabharwal of ICICI Bank. At present, this novel way of applying for a bank account is available across 30 cities with more than 10,000 tablets in circulation. In addition to opening current and savings bank accounts, ICICI Bank has started using tablets to offer mortgages across 11 cities such as Mumbai, Pune and Surat, where customers can apply and get loans sanctioned on the same day. The impact of the tablet can be seen from the fact that in the first eight months, the bank succeeded in opening half a million accounts. Another digital innovation can be seen from IndusInd Bank, which has launched an offering called ‘Video Branch’. This offering enables the customers to do a video conference with the bank staff. They can schedule a video call with the branch managers/relationship mangers or connect to the central Video Branch instantly. This is a unique initiative in the industry as it allows customers to interact with the video branch at their own convenience either from their desktop/laptop computers or Apple and Android smartphones. The customers get the assurance of faster and satisfactory resolution of queries by bank personnel including the service assurance of 30 minutes for select financial transactions. Speaking about the acceptance in the Indian market, Paul Abraham, Chief Operating Officer, IndusInd Bank says, “Due to its simplicity to operate and personal touch, we have seen usage by customers of all ages. In 24

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fact, older customers including senior citizens who find it difficult to travel to branches have been extensively using the Video Branch to get their banking services. The Non Resident Indian (NRI) customers in particular have found the Video Branch to be a very convenient means of reaching out to the bank from their country of residence.” Besides Video Branch, the bank has launched a number of unique initiatives such as ‘My Account My Number’ and online account opening. IndusInd Bank has also launched a digital branch at cyber city metro station, Gurgaon which is a unique combination of bringing human elements with digital elements working together. This branch has been setup in a digital theme design with architecture and real estate reflecting this theme. Starting with the signage on the outside of branch to entry into branch, consumers are greeted with digital signage integrated with streaming contents over network. One more unique initiative that shows how banks are making that extra effort to please the customer can be seen from ICICI Bank’s Electronic Branches initiative. Understanding that working individuals cannot be restricted to the fixed working hours of a bank, ICICI has setup automated electronic branches that allow customers the flexibility to transact at the time of their convenience for daily banking needs. Customers can transact on their own, at a time of their convenience, with the help of various automated devices and kiosks. The electronic branch offers the facilities of a cheque deposit A CyberMedia Publication

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‘Cardless Cash Withdrawal’, a service that allows its customers to transfer money from their account to anyone in India with a mobile number. The recipient can withdraw money round the clock without using a debit card from over 10,000 ATMs of ICICI Bank across the country. He can do this even without having a bank account of any bank. EXPERIMENTING WITH EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Similarly, Kotak Mahindra Bank has a highly In a fiercely contested market, banks are thinking more like product creators. ING Vysya Bank, for instance, is looking successful product called ‘Mail Money’, which allows at wearable technologies to take customer experience to customers to mail money by just knowing the email ID a different level. The bank has used smart watches which and the mobile number of the beneficiary. Beneficiaries has the Android Wear platform (a version of Google’s can choose to deposit the money in the accounts of Android operating system designed for smartwatches their choice. NFC is another exciting emerging technology that has and other wearables). “Using smart watches, customers can simply speak attracted the interest of some Indian banks. In January to the watch to fetch their account balance status. We 2015, ICICI Bank announced the launch of the country’s first ‘contactless’ debit and credit are currently testing the service cards, enabling its customers with a closed group of users,” to make electronic payments states Ashwin Khorana, CTO, by just waving the cards near ING Vysya Bank. As the watch the merchant terminal in lieu of is connected to a smartphone dipping or swiping them. These by Bluetooth, it is necessary for cards are based on the Near the smartphone to be in close IN A FIERCELY Field Communication (NFC) vicinity to the phone. CONTESTED MARKET, technology, which provides ING Vysya Bank is also excustomers the improved perimenting with Beacons. BANKS ARE THINKING convenience of speed as these As Beacons use Bluetooth cards require significantly less Low Energy or BLE, they can MORE LIKE PRODUCT time than traditional cards be used to deliver proximityCREATORS to complete a transaction based, context-aware mesalong with enhanced security sages. “We are exploring opas they remain in control of tions wherein Beacons can be the customer. Contactless used to identify a high-value customer when he walks into a branch,” states Khorana. payments are expected to be a milestone in the Indian Beacons could also be potentially used at ATMs wherein industry as they are designed to replace the use of cash a customer only needs to enter his PIN into the ATM, as in busy retail environments where speed and convenience he is already recognized by the mobile device he carries. are important, such as supermarkets and quick-service ING Vysya Bank has also used gamification techniques restaurants. These are exciting times for the Indian banks and to design its mobile app. For example, the balance of the user is shown in the form of a speedometer which allows customers too. For instance, who would have thought users to quickly see if he is in a green zone—sufficient that one day, your bank will come to your home to open your account. Who would have thought that you could balance or in a red zone (low balance). Recognizing the fact that a large segment of India’s transfer money with your social connections by just population does not have access to banking services, using your social credentials. By developing a slew of banking majors have started taking efforts to make sure innovative applications, Indian banks have truly shown the that people who do not have access to a banking account way for other industries on how they can take customer can still receive money. A case in point is ICICI Bank’s satisfaction to a different level. machine, an interactive kiosk through which Internet banking services can be accessed easily by just swiping a debit card, a cash deposit machine with instant credit facility and 24-hour video conferencing with ICICI Bank’s customer care personnel.

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Srikanth RP [email protected]

How Social, Mobile, and Online Trends are Reshaping the Indian Insurance Segment Indian insurance firms are aggressively adopting a number of technology initiatives to transform insurance into a pull product from a push product. Dataquest’s Srikanth RP spoke to industry leaders from different organizations to get their perspective on the impact of technology on the Indian insurance sector

INDUSTRY | COVER STORY

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wo big trends are underway in the Indian Insurance sector. The first one is obvious—the growing usage of tablets by a majority of players in this sector. This is corroborated by industry statistics by firms like Gartner. The research firm recently issued a report which stated that Indian insurance companies are on pace to spend `4.2 bn on mobile devices in 2015, with spending on tablets to increase by 64% over 2014. The second big trend is digitization. A 2014 report by the Boston Consulting Group and Google India predicts that the Indian insurance sector is set for digital disruption, with online insurance sales set to grow 20 times by 2020. The report estimates that three in every four insurance policies sold by 2020 would be influenced by digital channels during either the pre-purchase stage, purchase or renewal

stages. This report, titled Digital Insurance-20X By 2020, asserts that not only will insurance sales from online channels grow 20x from today by 2020, but overall Internet influenced sales would be a `300-400k crore opportunity. The researchers estimate that digital adoption could result in potential savings of 15-20% of total costs in the case of life insurance and 20-30% in the case of non-life—which could lead to better profitability for Indian insurance firms. While online is still a small portion of insurance activity in India, it is growing fast as many consumers use the Internet actively to research about a product. To better understand the impact of these trends in the Indian Insurance industry, Dataquest spoke to key industry players from different organizations. Here is their perspective in the first-person account:

—Girish Nayak —Giris Chief-S Chief-Service, Operations and Technology, ICICI L Lombard

At ICICI Lombard, we have used the mobile platform to improve and simplify the process of insurance claim. Traditionally, for claiming motor insurance, customers had to follow a lengthy and cumbersome process of taking their damaged vehicle to the garage, calling the toll-free number of the insurance company, and sharing the policy details. Then, they had to arrange the forms and documents required to support the claim. To shorten the otherwise lengthy procedure, we launched an in-house developed mobile claims app called ‘Insure’ for the customers and transformed the way in which claims were traditionally intimated. The customer now needs to simply download the app on his/her mobile phone or tablet device, take a picture of the damaged vehicle, communicate his version of the accident/damage through a voice recording facility within the app and send the claim intimation from the app itself. The app also allows customers to locate the nearest network garage, hospital or ICICI Lombard branch through special geotagging software embedded in the app itself. For on-field claim surveyors, we have developed an app called ‘FastTrack’. Using the FastTrack app, on-field surveyors can take images, fill in the necessary data and immediately sync information to central server to process a claim. This has significantly reduced the time taken for processing a claim. The quality of data filed too has improved significantly as underwriters have better and quick access to photographs and data captured by the tablet. Today, 80% of our surveys are done using tablets.

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—Rishi Piparaiya Director-Marketing & Direct Sales, Aviva Life Insurance

The insurance industry has gone through a major transformation with the entry of private players in 2001. In the preprivatization era, there were two primary sales channels—the company’s own sales force and agency (third party). Today, selling is done through a wide range of channels including online, bancassurance, corporate agents, call centers, brokers, direct, and agency. To complement these channels, the number of branches and offices of insurance companies have also multiplied. There were only 2,200 life insurance branches in 2001. Today, between 23 life insurance companies in India, there are over 12,000 branches spread across the nation. However, the biggest transformation for insurers has been the shift of focus towards the online distribution channel. Studies indicate that by 2020, 75% of the sales would be driven by digital channels. Online insurance sales market in India would be around `3,500 to `6,000 crore for life insurance and `11,000 to `15,000 crore for non-life insurance. This is largely because of the rising number of Internet users in the country and the convenience that the online platform gives to the customer. Also, since online as a medium has a lower distribution cost, the products it offers are cheaper than the offline products, ensuring better returns. There are currently around 15 insurance companies in India offering online term plans. But with the potential it holds, more new players are likely to enter the online market. At Aviva India, we started out on a transformational journey three years ago, to become a leading digital insurer. Betting big on digital technologies and process automation, we have invested heavily in strengthening our core policy administration platform, building up a data integration layer and service oriented architecture, analytics and mobility. We have launched a few new initiatives such as: n A responsive design device agnostic self-service portal for customers, enabling them to access their portfolio anytime anywhere resulting in an increased usage of portal by more than 60% in comparison to the earlier version. n We also rolled out a tablet-enabled sales process, aiming to help the frontline sales persons to sell better. This solution helps the agent to manage the leads better, conduct needs analysis and recommend products to customers. Generating benefit illustrations in front of the customer, filling up forms, collecting documents are some of the salient features of the product. We further plan to invest on mobility projects and will be developing intuitive mobility applications for customers and revamp all digital assets for making them device agnostic. This will help enhance customer convenience, accessibility and simplicity. We are also planning to spend on enhancing our BPM capability to infuse agility into our processes and will re-engineer our internal processes to ensure that they are aligned with our digital agenda. Social media today is one of the most effective mediums to communicate with customers. It allows one to have conversations with customers unlike any other medium. It’s fast, focused, and engaging. At Aviva, we give paramount importance to social media. We have over 5 lakh engagements on our Facebook page. We are also only the second life insurance company in India to have a verified Twitter account and have one of the highest engagement scores on the micro-blogging site. Our key focus has been to engage with young parents, to make them understand the importance of sound financial planning in order to protect their child’s future, and social media has been integral in achieving this. Towards this, we have created a community of young parents on social media and reach out to them with parenting tips, contests, etc. Aviva is one of the leaders in terms of engagement on social media among life insurance companies in India. We have been in the top three in engagement

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rates across platforms consistently and have one of the highest Klout scores in the category. Along with engagement, we are also using social media to increase product awareness by targeting Facebook users with our online plans. India currently has around 243 mn active Internet users and is likely to surpass the US in the next two years. This growing number, along with other factors, has massively impacted the insurance industry with the online distribution channel, becoming one of the top revenue contributors. At Aviva, we have constantly focused on the online channel, recognizing the massive potential it holds. In three years, our online channel’s contribution to business has increased from 8% to 25%. The online portfolio also has the highest persistency rate of more than 90%. Aviva’s success on the digital platform is largely due to our initiatives in process, technology and innovation. We have constantly strived to improve the online buying journey of the customer, making it simple, fast and convenient. Customers can buy Aviva’s policies with minimal documentation—the form filling is online and documents like address and identity proofs can be sent through an e-mail or WhatsApp. Along with our helpline, we also have an online chat application through which our representatives can guide the customer at each step. We also have a dedicated team for servicing the needs of the online customers.

—Satishwar Balakrishnan Head-IT, IndiaFirst Life Insurance

Our marketing strategy involves using technology innovatively to clearly communicate our brand values, which revolves around the core principles of honesty and transparency. We believe that life insurance today is not fully understood, and hence, there is a need to simplify communications through easy to understand products and policies. There is a critical need to demystify the way insurance is sold in the country today. For example, when you buy a shampoo, the manufacturers do not focus on telling you its chemical composition. Insurance too needs a simplified marketing strategy to clearly communicate the value. Customers must understand what they are buying and what they are getting. Social media is an extraordinary platform and can be extremely useful to companies to engage themselves with the customer and to listen to what they have to say. It is not enough to merely share what we have to say. Today, it’s all about conversations— communicating, engaging, collaborating and exchanging views, experiences, and best practices. The fundamental assumption about the insurance industry is that no one buys insurance. Technology can dismantle this assumption, and let the customer take the initiative. Technology can also significantly cut down the largest component of price, which is the cost of distribution. Push can then be transformed into pull. Keeping in line with time and technological advancements, we came up with MagicBoard, a tablet-based initiative to provide a convenient and easily accessible solution to our customers as well as our sales team. While on one hand, this tablet-based application reduces the salesperson’s efforts of dealing with numerous papers; on the other hand, it also helps in keeping track of the customer’s data.

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MagicBoard not only automates and simplifies the sales processes at the customer end, but in a single platform, it connects the customer with the distributor, employees and the insurance organization in a 360 degree integration where every stakeholder has a single page view in his handheld tablet PC for real-time information, intelligence and intervention. The user interface has been developed keeping simplification and ease of use in mind. Unnecessary steps/process have been eliminated to provide an intuitive and seamless experience for the end user. A sales person can now complete a sale on the spot (with or without access to Internet) within 30 minutes. MagicBoard also allows the sales person to cater to customer requests, complaints and claims instantly through live video calls, instant access to key personnel in the corporate office etc. It integrates the customer, distributor, employee and insurance company into one single platform of information, interaction, and fulfillment for both sales and service. Technology-based solutions are fast becoming or should we say have already become the epicenter of ‘decision making’ for both consumers and organizations. While easy access to information and the extent of digital disruption means freedom and transparency for consumers, for the insurance sector, like others, it also means having a better understanding of consumer purchase behaviour and spending habits, access to influencer networks and more importantly a more focused and cost effective way of doing business. It is but a known fact that a non-smoker enjoys a lesser premium rate on a life insurance policy as compared to a smoker and hence, to that extent, we’d say that this is already happening. Consumer data points, may it be eating habits, genetic history or even shopping history are but ways to understand them better and form a trend so that informed decisions for the future can be made. The only point of caution here is the angle of privacy, which needs to be well managed if one is to truly benefit. This is because these data points are sensitive in nature and the relationship of trust that a brand shares with its customers is also dependent on how well this gets managed.

—Gunjan Ghai SVP & National Head Branding, Marketing & Product Development, SBI General Insurance Company

I call insurance as the dark horse of eCommerce. While reports abound about how e-tailing is growing, few know that insurance is already ahead in terms of penetration of digital in the business mix. However, a more fundamental change that is likely to pick-up in insurance is the digitization of business processes. General insurance companies are moving towards making claims, servicing, underwriting and operations digitized in a big way. For example, radio tagging cattle for tracking the cattle as an insured asset is something that has become part of the business. Telematics to measure correlations between driving behavior and a likelihood of claims is something that some of the general insurance companies are experimenting with. Health data on mobile devices is also a future opportunity for health insurance companies to tap into. Hence, focusing on eCommerce would limit the view on how far digitization is fundamentally changing the general insurance industry. By itself, eCommerce has rapidly changed the business for simple, easy to buy products like travel insurance. For motor insurance and health insurance, the need for manual intervention to take the customer from interest to purchase still exists. This might be due

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to the relative complexity and ticket sizes of these products. This is likely to reach an inflection point only if the industry moves towards differential pricing on digital vs offline in a significant way. For motor insurance, usage based pricing is something of interest to insurance companies. Worldwide though, telematics experience has been a mixed bag. While the ‘Pay As You Go’ (PAYG) model should have taken off, the reliability of the model, in terms of tamperproof devices, the cost of the device, provider switching, etc., have been stumbling blocks to the model being successful. For India, if car manufacturers are able to deploy these devices across the range of cars and the device is provider neutral, there may be some merit in low car usage customers choosing to save premium. Further, the regulators view on this would also determine the application and controls required for telematics. For health insurance, pricing based on genetic history is unlikely to kick in anytime soon as such a rating factor borders on discrimination against certain groups. Medical history based pricing or lifestyle based pricing would depend on the availability of credible and reliable data. While consumer electronics is moving in the direction of capturing health information on the fly, its reliability and correlations with health outcomes is yet to be established.

—Subrat Mohanty Head of Marketing and IB Sales, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance

The digital quantum leap and ensuing technologies have led to a pronounced transformation of expectations and experiences—customers await rapid, individualized, premium-value services and information. From a paper-dominated world we are shifting towards a digital world in which new means of communication and information-sharing make it possible to work independently of time and place. As one of the leading private life insurers, we have been continuously focusing on the use of technology to improve the customer experience and reduce time for servicing the existing customers and new business/renewal transactions. Intended to provide a secure and location-independent insurance tool to its field-force, we leveraged technology and developed INSTAB—Instant Insurance Solutions on Tablet. INSTAB is an Android application equipped for new business acquisition, renewals collection, and policy service requests. This point-of-sale tool addresses every insurance requirement from sourcing to servicing. As the premium collection, payment and servicing acknowledgment is done within a few minutes, it has helped us in reducing the turnaround time and enhancing customer satisfaction. We have also recently introduced an Android-based app for the customers as a self-servicing platform to avail our services without visiting the branch. Customers can add policies, save transaction receipts, update their profile, and track, manage and raise service requests through this application. We are also witnessing a substantial increase in our social media presence. We recently conducted an online campaign called ULIPedia on Facebook and Twitter. The campaign was aimed at imparting upfront knowledge and clarifications on unit-linked insurance policies as an insurance product category. A one-day contest was also organized on these two social networking platforms. Through this campaign, a total of 10.8 lakh people were reached and the corporate website pages saw a substantial growth in traffic.

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Harnath Babu [email protected]

The Impact of Enterprise Mobility on Smartphones are here to stay, and the challenge for companies is to determine competitive advantage

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the Financial Services Industry how to use mobility to capture growth and uncover new forms of

M

obility has made a significant jump in the last decade transforming from simple handhelds to complex next-generation smartphones and this has led to the proliferation of mobile devices across consumers. The higher adoption of mobility has resulted in businesses competing with one another to discover further means to exploit these technologies for better customer service and growth. With technology always at hand, customers expect faster responses and personal attention from every organization they transact with. Mobile means no more waiting in line and being connected means the way businesses communicate with their customers. Like other industries, financial services companies too first leveraged on mobility as communication and connectivity enabler. As the technology became more ubiquitous, the utility value of mobile devices increased multi-fold. Many early adopters started utilizing these devices in their field operations. As an example, an insurance company started sending text messages to customers informing them on status of their policies or reminding on premium due date. With changes in technology, it advanced to collecting renewal premiums and issuing premium receipts to customers using a connected Bluetooth mobile printer on the move. This was further extended by P&C carriers to enhance auto claims processing using basic smartphones, which could transmit pictures and reports from surveyors back to the company in real-time for quicker turnaround of claims settlement, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. ADVANCEMENT OF NETWORKING AND SMARTPHONE TECHNOLOGIES

Financial services companies have evolved along with advancements in web and mobility technologies and it did not really take them long to leap forward from brick and mortar setup to virtual. With the advancement of networking and smartphone technologies, they www.dqindia.com

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quickly fostered themselves to provide mobility applications for customers to download on their mobile phones and transact with the company in real-time. There have been interesting applications of mobility and social in the financial services sector, which are emerging at a rapid pace and have been seeing traction amongst customers and companies. Many companies are leveraging mobility and social to launch new product ideas, such as mobile live chat options to elicit user opinions and provide basic services to drive customer satisfaction. With lowered switching barriers, customer service becomes an important aspect for retaining customer loyalty. For a bank, it would be beneficial to provide mobile-based personalized services like opening of account, fund transfers, payment of bills, etc, as today’s customer is ready to pay premium for services which are available round the clock, anywhere and anytime. For instance, an insurance company can provide mobile applications to customers for completing selfservicing options such as requesting for a change in policy terms, payment of premium or purchasing a policy itself. The stickiness created by a mobile application can be further exploited to do cross and up-sell of various other products being offered by the company. Today’s customer is a muti-channel user and providing a consistent and unified experience across all channels is no more theoretical. Branch innovation is yet another imperative that companies need to consider while targeting the customer of today and future. As an example, an HNI 34

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customer walking in to a bank branch can be given personalized experience using a tablet-based application by a customer service executive instead of making him wait with others in the queue. This will not only enable the bank to provide customer delight, but also an opportunity to offer more customized products and better customer retention. FACING THE CHALLENGES

Banks and insurance companies are also rapidly arming their sales force with tablet/mobile-based solutions that provide real-time access to carrier systems. These enable agents a convenient way to showcase their offerings to prospects and to readily adapt as per unique client needs. The agent can convert a prospect to a customer as quickly as in few minutes by collecting information in real time and getting it processed at the backend or through automated underwriting solutions. Sales team managers can use mobile-based performance dashboards to monitor leads and conversions to optimize sales performance and make commission payments to agents. Smartphones are here to stay, and the challenge for companies is to determine how to use mobility to capture growth and uncover new forms of competitive advantage. In a mobile world, things don’t stand still for long.

The author is CIO, Aviva Life Insurance A CyberMedia Publication

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Srikanth RP [email protected]

HDFC Life Shows how Enterprise Social Networks can Boost Collaboration My Life, an internal social network built by HDFC Life, has helped in creating a collaborative community culture

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s a young company with a passionate workforce and a large geographical footprint, HDFC Life wanted a platform through which each employee could connect with the other anywhere within the organization. In addition, the organization also wanted to provide its employees a base to interact with their colleagues and management besides sharing innovative 36

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ideas, which could allow the organization to graduate to the next level. Inspired by social networking platforms, HDFC Life decided to deploy a social networking application internally to facilitate a smarter way of working together. Before building the platform, the organization started identifying various existing cases that could be executed at HDFC Life. After a detailed study, the company finalized A CyberMedia Cybe Cybe y rMe rMedia dia Publication Publi Pu blicat bli cation cat ion

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Due to thorough research and action planning, we were able to achieve huge participation in just 5-6 months. Such results are generally achieved by other organizations after 2-3 years —Thomson Thomas CIO, HDFC Life

strategic objectives of the platform, thereby setting up a measurement framework and ensuring data security controls to prevent untoward incidents. The next task was to encourage employees to start using the social network called ‘My Life’. Extensive communication to employees was done through teasers e-mails and SMSes. Employees were sent a link of the mobile app through an SMS to encourage them to install it. To accelerate the employee on-boarding process on this platform, various training sessions with the departments including HODs and their direct reporting managers were held. Simultaneously, education mailers were sent to employees about how to use various features of ‘My Life’. This created the required impact in just 5 months’ time, as around 7,000 employees logged in and started using the network for discussions, idea sharing and for connecting with colleagues and seniors across locations. In order to increase participation and derive business benefits from MyLife, a mix of engagement and business focused activities were conducted regularly. For example, the firm conducted a ‘Best Community Contest’ in the initial weeks to get people to begin new communities. Quizzes were conducted regularly to drive competitive spirit. To get field level inputs into issues faced by the organization, the team conducted a best idea contest. Additionally, live chat sessions with the CEOs, HODs and subject matter experts were conducted weekly on this platform. THE IMPACT

Today, there are more than 400 communities related to departmental initiatives, innovation, and common interest areas. These communities, in turn, have helped in creating |

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a knowledge bank of all discussions and documents. Communities educate employees in tax planning, selling better, clearing CFA exams and sharing regional practices with everyone across the country. A recognition community has been created and all achievement stories, felicitation pictures, etc, are shared here. All teams today are using MyLife to share important ‘how to documents’ for everyday tasks like using e-learning platform, lead management system, claim reimbursement, etc. Additionally, live chats to connect with all India employees are regularly conducted. “MyLife has been a fascinating journey as social platforms fundamentally question the culture of an organization. Collaboration platforms are being used imaginatively over the world, and we believe that mastering this new way to work will be key to success in the future,” says Uzma Jamal Rushdi, VP-Strategy, HDFC Life.” Due to the nature of social networking websites, there is a real danger of frivolous activities overcoming professional activities. HDFC Life has managed to avoid this issue through planning and execution. “It is now seen as a place which helps HDFC Life become better at what we do in an engaging manner, and also helps connect with like-minded hobbyists without a ‘frivolous’ connotation,” states Thomson. Going forward, the team plans to make the platform more user-friendly and introduce gamification to drive participation and engagement. The team intends to continue with the departmental ownership concept every month with different HODs to drive participation from each department. HDFC Life also plans to focus on migrating business processes which will help in making the portal an integral part of an employee’s life. www.dqindia.com

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Durjoy Patranabish [email protected]

Banking on Data With the advent of machine learning tools such as Python and techniques such as natural language processing, support vector machines learning algorithm are on the path of revolutionizing the way the industry works

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he banking and financial industry is considered as one of the early adopters of analytics. The technological advancements have transformed the way the BFSI industry works. Now with the unprecedented rise of data, the BFSI is on the threshold of reinventing itself. Additionally, factors such as rise in operational costs, cutting-edge competition, and incremental risk are driving banks and other financial institutes to constantly innovate and differentiate. Banking has always been considered as a data heavy industry, thus analytics has the ability to redefine the playing field. Today, most of the major banks have started embracing advanced analytics and making data the center of its decisions. There has been a paradigm shift towards analytics-based decision making. Analytics tools can help business across different horizontals of the organization ranging from marketing, risk to HR management. A datadriven and evidence-based business model allows banks to understand its customers, markets, competitors and empower its workforce. Today, there is no dearth of tools which can help companies achieve analytics excellence. In fact, these tools are not new to banks. What has changed is the scope of their applications which have been driven by deviations in the regulatory and economic landscape.

THE CHALLENGES

The challenge is to choose the right one for your organization. This should start from understanding the key problems companies want to address—the key is asking the right, well defined questions. It is only when companies have clarity on the end objective they can pick out the most apt one from the array of tools available. If we look at the analytics maturity curve, different stages of data management and analytics require different tools. Many times companies ignore the importance of having a robust data management system. This lays the foundation of the analytics. The data management can be divided into three major criterias—database management system, data modeling, and ETL. Each step requires specialized tools, for instance SQL Server, TERADATA, Oracle, Informatica. Post this stage, there’s tremendous value that can be gleaned from this wealth of data. From this stage organizations can focus on building high end, dynamic reports by working with tools such as Microstrategy, Cognos, Tableau, and sportfire. Each of these tools come with their own |

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strengths and weaknesses and depending on the existing infrastructure, feature, budget, data size, etc. Tools such as SAS, R, SPSS are able to help organizations understand few of the key business questions. Open source tools such as R and WPS enable companies to experiment with different techniques without making huge investments. The market is fast evolving and companies are taking that extra mile to understand their customer base. This is equally important for the financial industry as well. Today, we have most advanced and sophisticated tools and algorithms which help us analyze not just structured data but also unstructured data. With the advent of machine learning tools such as Python and techniques such as natural language processing, support vector machines learning algorithm are on the path of revolutionizing the way the industry works. These tools in combination with intelligent modeling techniques can really help the BFSI industry scale new heights. Companies are using it across function such as risk, marketing, CRM to: „ Focus on customer-centric approach ensuring it becomes an integral part of the companies culture „ Take swifter and efficient decision-making „ Monitor compliance effectively „ Take more data driven decisions thus increasing the operational efficiency which in turn contributes to the overall revenue enhancement „ Compute various scorecards such as collection, application to better risk management „ Identify key products and customers „ Allow senior management to obtain competitive insights thus building their overall strategy WALK WITH CARE

However, the BFSI industry is advised to walk with caution. While using various big data tools and techniques can reap huge benefits, one should never lose sight of the importance of data security. Companies should not shy away from making significant investments in building a vigorous data governance model and data encryption tools. They might seem an insignificant part but they are imperative for the overall success of the endeavor. There are already multiple use cases in the financial industry which stress on the importance of companies using the right tools and techniques to leverage the power of data. The author is SVP & Business Leader, Analytics, Blueocean Market Intelligence www.dqindia.com

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Even as IBM fights it out in the systems business, it has not lost its mojo in designing big computing gear. Viswanath Ramaswamy, Country Leader, Server Solutions (POWER & Mainframe) IBM India, in an exclusive interview with Dataquest, explains that IBM z13, the newest mainframe would be used to handle ‘trending’ workloads. Excerpts

IBM’S NEWEST MAINFRAME Z13 TO HANDLE ‘TRENDING’ WORKLOADS —VISWANATH RAMASWAMY Country Leader, Server Solutions (POWER & Mainframe) IBM India

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ainframes continue to be an IBM thing and the z13 is the newest in that line. What does IBM intend the machine to handle? The product z13 is a culmination of 5 years of investment and R&D of IBM that tops $1 bn. The z13 is designed primarily to cater to the trending workloads which are primarily around the mobile, analytics and cloud. |

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From a product standpoint it is the fastest processor, has got 300% more memory and about 100% more bandwidth. From transactional response point, especially when you see from analytics and mobile interventions, the response time is in milliseconds. Those are the type of capabilities which really bring up z13 as a platform. To add to that, IBM also has announced the support for KVM. www.dqindia.com

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You said z13 is targetted at handling trending workloads which stands for mobile, cloud, and analytics. What is the performance like? z13 systems present almost 60% faster throughput compared to x-86 systems, almost 35-40% faster response time, and lower cost per transaction. For mobile and analytics workload, it reduces the cost per transaction by 10-15%, and is able to process almost 30,000 transactions per second and close to 2.5 bn transactions per day. The z13 all comes in the size of a refrigerator which can run close to about 8,000 virtual servers which is more than about 50 odd virtual servers per core. Today, clients are using farms of commodity systems regarding mobile transactions–it bloats up into 5 additional transactions. Every mobile transaction that we transact has a ripple effect—it goes to the bank, it goes to the portal, from portal it goes to the bank—credit card authentication, intra-bank and so on and so forth. This phenomenon is called the “star burst effect”. Today, all these mobile transactions are run through disparate systems. When you add analytics, it is not really real time; there is bound to be latency. That’s where z13 comes into play where workload, which is the mobile transaction and the analytics workload, is handled in real-time within the z systems itself. What about other things like energy economics and security? Yes, it means a lot for clients and customers when it comes to cooling, cost, storage. It also lowers the software cost of the machine itself. From software perspective and hardware perspective, it increases the speed of the data encryption. It has got new cryptographic security which protects privacy of data from mobile devices to data centers. What space would z13 occupy in the crowded systems marketplace? We are looking at this in terms of workloads. If you take the commodity systems, there is a point or a threshold till which you can have an ‘x’ volume of systems at a particular data center, beyond which you’re all the licensing, cooling, space, and so on and so forth, does not become commercially viable. 42

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If you look at engineered systems, most in the market today are more or less catering to the traditional workloads, like database applications up to a certain point, beyond which you cannot scale up. The z13 system kicks in when you don’t have to buy the entire machine right now but you have the capacity to tweak around on various workloads, on opensource or on the ZOS. What really happens is that it has the best of both worlds. So you have the most secure, reliable and robust databases running on it. You can run your Oracle on it or you can run your DB2 on it and the rest of the partition of the virtual machines would be running all the workloads that had been running traditionally on commodity systems. So it is the convergence of having both the engineered and commodity systems running in one single machine. How does z13 fare in the cloud infrastructure scenario? The z13 is ideal for private or hybrid cloud architecture, legendary for its ability to scale and reliably and securely handle multiple workloads. In a scale-out model, it is capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers—more than 50 virtual servers per core, helping to lower software, energy and facilities costs. The z13 lowers the cost of running cloud. For compared environments, it is estimated that a z Systems cloud on a z13 will have a 32% lower total cost of ownership over three years than an x86 cloud and a 60% lower total cost of ownership over three years than a public cloud. Additionally, the z13 is based on open standards, fully supporting Linux and OpenStack. Will your channel partners remain the same for selling z13? From channel perspective, the partner ecosystem remains the same. With z systems, it is more application driven and workload driven system. We would see a lot of ISDs who are primarily catering into the mobile and analytics space would be the “influencers,” if I may use that word, to kind of influence the infrastructure requirements of their clients. It would be all these and application and independent software vendors—who are primarily into mobile and analytics who would really do that. From a partner ecosystem there would be new set of influencers in the ecosystem for getting the right infrastructure for their clients. A CyberMedia Publication

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Onkar Sharma [email protected]

IT-LED BIG DATA PROJECTS ALWAYS FAIL Big data is not what most CIOs assume tells Stephen Brobst, CTO, Teradata Corporation who was in India recently. Brobst throws light on the different aspects of big data and how it can be used in different environments. Excerpts

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n Teradata’s India presence... We have multiple development labs in India. The largest one is in Hyderabad. That is a hard core R&D lab, the core of the engine. We started our operations in India about 15 years ago. That time, it was more testing than high intellectual stuff. But now we are doing core development at our Indian R&D environment. We cannot quote the exact number of employees but it is in large hundreds. We also got development going on in Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru. But Hyderabad is the most important one. What are the focus areas in R&D? Is it offshore? What I was talking about was hard core R&D. We are doing product development in that group. In core areas of the engine, ie, the optimizer and the file system, we have implemented some of the advanced features like temporal data management that was done mainly in the Indian part of our organization. 44

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—STEPHEN BROBST Chief Technology Officer, Teradata Corporation

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Since Teradata is into big data and analytics, what sort of challenges you see in this space? How is your development team working around solving these problems? You call it a challenge I call it an opportunity. The industry moves very quickly. If you stand still for any amount of time, you will be passed by. We have to be much better than our competition otherwise people won’t buy our products. And yet we dominate in the big data and data warehousing space. And the reason we dominate is because we are always developing next-generation while the other guys are still thinking of the previous generation. We do a lot of work with universities. We have very smart customers and we listen to them. We are working very closely with our customers and they help us understand not just what they want now but where are they going in the future. Our job is to get there before them. Right now the area where we are having a lot of success is the big data space. Has the big data landscape changed? Big data is more non-traditional data. True uses of big data were basically dominated by the dot coms mainly in Silicon Valley. There is a lot of confusion over what is big data. And the ones that were doing it well were almost always dotcoms. They were eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, Google and these kinds of players. The volume is not really the important part. That’s where people get confused. In India, if volume was the issue they have been doing big data for 20 years. Just because the size of the marketplace is big, everything is high volume data. Big data is not about high volume. The Indian marketplace is particularly confused at this point about that. How relevant is big data for BFSI, healthcare, or retail? Let’s talk about things that we can do today. If we look at the traditional analytics, most companies whether you are a bank or a telecommunications company or retailer they analyze transactions at the lowest level of detail. And transactions at the Indian marketplace with a billion people are high volume. It’s not big data but high volume data. Big data means that I am less interested in the bigness of the data and I am more interested in the diversity of the data. So I don’t want the transactions but I want the interactions. If you are a bank you see that I make a deposit online. But do you know all the clicks and all the searches that led up to that purchase? That’s the interaction. That’s the order of magnitude of bigger data probably 200 times of big46

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ger data than the transaction. So yes it is high volume but that’s not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is now the customer behavior not just the transaction. The web log data is not as structured as a transaction that you get in a banking system or a retail system or so on. There are new kinds of data type such as JSON for example. In Silicon Valley anyone who uses XML is a dinosaur. JSON (Javascript Object Notation) is a selfdescribing data type that allows you to do late binding. It is very flexible and it has roughly the same type of functionality. JSON is being used to capture sensor data, log data and social interaction data. If we talk about interactions, then there is clickstream data. I can talk about tweeting about my experience on your retail site. Or Facebook blogging about my experience in your bank, the voice call interaction with a call center. Most banks record those calls and they do no analytical value from them. There is a ton of content in that interaction. So now the technologies exist to be able to capture the voice and do voice to text translation fact to mention sentimental scoring on the text they capture. This is big data. Now we are getting into very different kinds of data. It is not some record oriented thing you put in an excel spreadsheet. It is a voice file, text file, web log data or social media interaction, very different kinds of data. How can businesses adopt big data and make it work for their business? How can they get true insights in their business, can they use it to prevent some disaster or moving forward with new business goals? I think there are a couple of critical success factors. One of them especially in this marketplace is that you need to think big, but start small. Don’t try to solve all the problems at once. Take ‘A’ problem, particularly in this scale of the marketplace you can’t do it all at once. So pick a problem that has high volume, high priority of business and then focus on that problem, create a value and then focus on a self-sustaining model. This is particularly true with big data. IT led big data projects almost always fail. It is very important that you have these kinds of initiatives that you have business stakeholder as a part of that team, so that there is a collaboration that takes place between business and IT. IT by themselves will not be successful and business by themselves will not be successful, so you really need to get that joint team in place. So the thing is to look at what is your business goal, what are you trying to do. Big data is not always the answer, but sometimes it is the answer. A CyberMedia Publication

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INDUSTRY | EVENT REPORT

Smita Vasudevan

[email protected]

SMI : The Convergence Makes the Difference Alone it is strong, together it is disruptive. That is the power of convergence of Social, Mobile and IoT (SMI)

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ith the enormous growth opportunities and transformational capabilities that IoT brings to organizations today, it would be apt to say that it is one technology that is turning dreams into reality. A plethora of connected devices, exchanging and generating information that can be converted into actionable data for proactive decision making, improved

product functionality, enhanced customer experience and probably much more. This would really have been a dream for many till some years back until connected devices made their way into the enterprise. With the convergence of Social, Mobile and IoT (SMI), the opportunities and possibilities for realizing business gains are extending beyond imagination. Globally, transformations driven by IoT technologies are

Panel discussion moderated by Ibrahim Ahmad, Editor-in-Chief, Dataquest & Voice&Data |

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Sai Pratyush, Head, Enterprise Mobility, Tata Teleservices, during his session on Do Big Symposium

One of the speakers during his presentation

being witnessed and new success stories are being talked about. Still, IT industry experts indicate that it is just the tip of the iceberg and the technology is yet to unleash its true potential. Even in India, organizations are gradually waking up to the realities of IoT and making their moves in that direction. While it is still in its initial stages, Internetof-things is all set to transform and disrupt the enterprise landscape and organizations need to chart their way ahead in terms of preparing themselves to the new business realities and aligning their models around IoT. There is still a lot of hype, confusion and uncertainty that surrounds the trend. The Do Big Symposium by Tata Docomo in Bengaluru, on the theme ‘Harnessing the Power of Social, Mobile and IoT (SMI) for Business Transformation’ attempted to cut through the hype and look into the realities of dealing with IoT and its complexities. The keynote session by Ganesh Krishnan, Founder, Growthstory.in threw light on the technology disruptions and new growth avenues that connected devices have brought in convergence with the growing adoption of mobility and social. Krishnan emphasized that there is a lot more to be seen as IoT is still nascent and yet to go mainstream. “The real excitement and opportunity for enterprises is that it has just started. IoT is still very new,” he said. He also shared his thoughts on how the technology landscape has evolved to become a core part

of the enterprise today and cited examples from his early years in the industry when it used to be a daunting task to even establish a case for technology adoption. Also, enhanced Internet connectivity and bandwidth has enabled enterprises to embrace new technologies. When asked about his take on how organizations can differentiate between the bubbles and long standing technology game changers, Krishnan pointed out, “The straight answer is you really can’t differentiate.” It is not something that can be predicted. “You know only when you try. The good thing is that the cost of trying new technologies has come down,” he said. Being a serial entrepreneur, he also pointed out some examples from his own entrepreneurial ventures like Bigbasket. com that was started in 2011 and now boasts of over 1.5 lakh customers and reportedly gets an average of 5,000 orders a day. It is technologies like mobility and social that has powered many such small businesses to become familiar names in their own space. Although, mobility in itself is a big disruptive force and is seeing accelerated growth, its convergence with IoT is what is expected to take it to another level. For instance, businesses can predict consumer behavior, identify stock shortages and plan distribution way ahead on the basis of information derived out of connected devices. And these are only some of the use cases of SMI.

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Ibrahim Ahmad, Group Editor, CyberMedia Group, in conversation with keynote speaker, Ganesh Krishnan, Founder, Growthstory.in THE STRUGGLE

Despite the acceptance and acknowledgment for SMI potential, enterprises are still struggling to implement it successfully and perceive it as a core part of their business strategy. Also, finding the right solution partner is essential in striking gold with SMI. In this context, the panel discussion tried to explore the ‘how to’ aspect of SMI adoption. The speakers Amitava Ghosh, Chief Technology Officer, TaxiForSure and Bhupendra Khanal, CEO and Co-founder, Simplify360 shared their views stating specific instances on how a mix of mobility, social, and IoT is constantly transforming their respective industries. “For TaxiForSure the basic idea was using the Internet to connect the supply with the demand,” said Ghosh. Additionally, social media along with mobility has extended the possibilities for analytics and real-time decision making. “The power of prediction and real-time intelligence is the power of social media,” added Khanal. Currently, industries like automotive, manufacturing, and utility are at the forefront of IoT transformation. But as the potential is fully unleashed and new opportunities are explored within other areas, more and more successful transformational stories will come to the fore. “We are a couple of years away till it becomes common. IoT has got a lot of promise,” said Krishnan. |

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Internet-of-things is capable of bringing in disruptive changes to the way organizations function and the way they deal with employees and customers. Business models are being realigned to IoT technologies to discover new revenue streams and realize cost savings and improved customer experience. “Enterprises will not be able to survive unless they use and adopt technology even for non-technology areas,” emphasized Krishnan. As connected devices expand, the data that is being generated out of these devices is going to be of mammoth size. SMI hence will open up huge opportunities but at the same time pose bigger challenges for enterprises to make sense of this exploding data, stitch it all together and create a roadmap backed by real-time insights. Also, the security risk, which remains one of the main deterrents to the adoption of new technologies, will have to be taken into consideration. Yet, it is possible to withstand and overcome these challenges, if organizations plan their way ahead and develop a clear SMI strategy along with the right solution partner. It is interesting and also essential to note that the technologies—social, mobile, and IoT are strong forces in their own right but together they are disruptive. That’s what makes the real difference, the convergence. www.dqindia.com

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INDUSTRY | TALKING POINT

Smita Vasudevan [email protected]

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES TO FIGHT NEW AGE CRIMES —RAVIKUMAR SREEDHARAN Vice President, Application Development and Maintenance (ADM), Unisys India 52

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It’s a time when electronic and cyber crimes are burgeoning, and law enforcement agencies have some new challenges to face. In this digital era where traditional mechanisms often stand irrelevant, technology has a bigger role to play in handling complex crimes. In an interaction with Dataquest, Ravikumar Sreedharan, Vice President, Application Development and Maintenance (ADM), Unisys India, talks about the increasingly complex needs of law enforcement agencies and how a framework system like U-LEAF (Unisys’ Law Enforcement Applications Framework) can deliver the right mechanism to fight new age crimes. Excerpts

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ow is the threat landscape for law en- straints around budgets about resourcing, etc, and that forcement agencies changing in the new is something which we wanted to address. For instance, what we heard is that the police forces of England and technology era? Cyber attacks are a painful reality for organi- Wales, are anticipating a loss of close to 34,000 officers in zations today. And businesses and govern- 2015. Likewise, Canada is cutting their public safety servments are not sitting still. They are weaving security to ices by almost 9%. So that’s the kind of pressure governall aspects of their operations. In the last 5-10 years, the ments are under in the area of public safety. These were couple of important things which we kept consumerization of IT and the concept of social computing have led to a state where enterprises have become in mind while building our security portfolio. Within the security portfolio at Unisys we borderless. So we have to rehave got three kinds of security secure the new wave of mobile solutions. One is people identity devices, users and applications solutions which are essentially resulting from this consumerizasolutions built around identifytion trend. In earlier times, we ing, verifying, and profiling citiused to have physical security GOVERNMENT zens be it travellers, passengers, and now we have physical plus ORGANIZATIONS AND or employees in a company cyber security. So that’s the refor both physical environment al-time visibility which we have LAW ENFORCEMENT as well as digital environment. to provide, across all aspects. AGENCIES WORLDWIDE Then, we have something called Cyber Security. Those soluWhat was the approach and ARE UNDER A LOT OF tions are around building infraobjective in building a framePRESSURE TO DO MORE structure that kind of gives you work system for the law envisibility across all aspects of forcement agencies? How WITH LESS IT operations, which would indifferent and unique were the clude your servers, networks, challenges? endpoints. That’s the concept of There were few challenges we cyber security. The third area is were trying to address. In today’s world, crimes have really become very complicat- industry focused security solutions. For example, banking ed. Traditional crimes have given way to what we call as industry requires a special kind of security solution. The the new-age crimes. It could be cyber crimes, it could be other important industry we serve is law enforcement. We Internet-enabled terrorism, etc. The rigour of investigation have got a domain called justice and public safety and a and the threat landscape are actually very different. That portfolio built around it. It focuses on collaboration across is one challenge. Other thing is government agencies and the terminal industry networks and responding faster to law enforcement agencies worldwide are under a lot of emergencies. U-LEAF is actually part of the justice and pressure to do more with less. There are severe con- public safety domain. |

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What are the challenges specifically for Indian law enforcement agencies? If you look at the recent trends even in India—the kind of incidents that are taking place and the response being generated from the community, there is a lot of awareness among citizens now and the expectations from law enforcement agencies to solve crimes quicker is also very high. The way in which most of these agencies are set up, is such that they are all operating in silos. That’s the way they have been set up traditionally. The challenge is to provide an interoperability or visibility across disparate agencies. So that’s the other challenge the industry has been facing. A very important thing we have seen in the last few years is that the volume and complexity of data that is relevant to any investigations is growing exponentially. The kind of data includes SMSes, webchats, biometric information, Twitter and Facebook updates, number of photographs being uploaded, all that is constantly growing. Also, around 80% of this is unstructured data. So there has to be a mechanism to make meaningful information out of all this data. There is need for a better approach to be taken by the law enforcement agencies. They need to harness the ability to combine a range of investigative tools, as it’s not just about one tool. They have to really use a range of investigative tools not only to analyze complex information but also to find ways of preventing crimes. Every time a crime happens, the question being asked is why you did not proactively address that. How does U-LEAF work towards resolving these challenges? Can you site some examples? When we found a solution, we talked about the real needs of the industry. We said U-LEAF as a framework should have few important characteristics. One is that, we should be able to provide visibility into disparate investigations, we should be able to foster increased collaboration between your command centers, analysts, officers and people who investigate crime on the ground. That’s one important feature we built. The other thing we talked about is there has to be accurate information on the go. So we need to incorporate a mobile feature by which accurate information can be provided to frontline officers in the most convenient manner. We built something called social media analytics. If we look at some of the recent crim54

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inal incidents in India, the question is whether we have been able to identify hidden trends and recurring patterns of behaviour. We knew that in some cases, criminals were actively engaged on social media forums. The question is if we had all this data we would be able to identify hidden trends and proactively address crimes and issues that sometimes human minds may not be able to decipher, so we need tools to do that. These are some of the important features incorporated in U-LEAF. What has been the response in the Indian market? We have not yet sold U-LEAF in India. But we have been actively engaged with some of the police forces to help them come with the right solution. The advantage is that we have been able to leverage our vast experience in public safety domain. We have got 45 years of experience in public safety. We have got police officers joining our company as the solution guys. So 80% of our team is actually ex police officers. If we go back and take a look at some of the recent cases of criminal attacks, how could a system like U-LEAF or anything similar could have helped law enforcement agencies in handling such cases? If you are able to identify hidden trends or recurring patterns of behaviour by an individual, that will be of great help to the police forces. There is no platform for police forces to talk across investigative agencies, at the same time there is also need to protect sensitive data. There is also at times fear in the police forces to share sensitive information, because they are worried that sensitive information might be leaked. So how do you make sure that you do the right thing? For that you need a platform, the right tools and the right intelligence. There is an element of application shelf life, so if we look at all the systems being used in our country, I think they have achieved their shelf life. Every application of this kind has a shelf life of about 10 years—beyond that they need to be modernized. That’s something police forces need to focus on and that’s where companies like us can really help. If we look at Western countries, they constantly modernize their systems and add features. We are relatively slow in adopting new technologies. The good thing is that there is a lot of positive feedback to solutions which companies like us provide. So I think we are moving in the right direction but the pace is quite slow. A CyberMedia Publication

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INDUSTRY | IN FOCUS

Manish Godha [email protected]

Why SMBs are Taking to Cloud Computing Cloud is a great news for SMBs as it allows them to focus on what technology can deliver, rather than delivering technology

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loud is good! Shared computing services— whether applications or platforms—available over Internet have granted small and medium-sized businesses an unprecedented access to technology sophistication. The potential inherent in information technology has been immense and the possible impacts are only getting more pronounced. Technology not only bolsters efficiencies, but also influences fundamental changes in |

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the business models themselves. But, getting technology to work for a particular business has traditionally been arduous, requiring significant expense, effort, and skills. As such, access to ‘enterprise-class’ has been limited to large businesses which can afford to invest for required application sophistication, reliable deployment, and operational support. Cloud changes this in a fundamental way. It allows the businesses to access the benefits of technology without www.dqindia.com

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(less reliance on corporate networks) are driving cloud application providers to be more available and accessible. Thus, cloud applications are much more likely to be available (or at least compatible) for a variety of devices— operating systems, browsers, or form-factors. Scalability: It is one of the more fundamental promises of cloud. Vast computing resources shared across a variety WHAT TECHNOLOGY CAN OFFER Choice: The sheer ease with which businesses can of users enable scalability—availability of computing explore, assess, and select various options on cloud is capacity (be it computing power, storage, number of breathtaking. Be it messaging, collaboration, accounting, users, etc) on demand. From a business perspective, CRM, or any other application—businesses have usage based pricing allows valuable flexibility. Thus enormous choice. Compared to the traditional on- making an IT environment available which is dynamic premises technologies, cloud has the ability to offer and fluid, with the ability to add new businesses, spin up this at a much lesser cost and commitment. A vibrant new services and respond to the ever changing customer needs is easily possible without much pain, effort, and community of users can also be quite helpful. Cost: Cost savings could be a big advantage to SMBs investment of time and costs. Performance and Support: Most cloud service proas they adopt cloud. These savings accrue primarily because cloud services are charged based on usage. viders design their offerings and are set-up to certain Thus, the costs of idle resources or over-capacity are standards for reliability, availability and performance. In saved. Further, as cloud involves mostly opex rather contrast, IT infrastructure and set-up at many SMBs has grown organically and thus end than capex, it can be much up being difficult to manage with more cash-flow friendly for an clear performance expectations. SMB. On-demand nature of Most cloud providers offer servcloud services means that the ice level agreements (SLA’s) business would not need to which can include parameters carry the costs of computing SMBs CAN ILL-AFFORD such as application performresources that are not in need. LARGE DEPLOYMENT OR ance, availability, datacenter upSpeed: SMBs can ill-afford time, host failure and migration, large deployment or upgrade UPGRADE PROJECTS, AND etc. Further, support is typically projects, and cloud dramatiCLOUD DRAMATICALLY available 24x7 to assist with iscally reduces the time taken to sues, and other such events. provision, setting up services REDUCES THE TIME TAKEN Standardization and Inteand making applications availTO PROVISION, SETTING gration: Increasingly, cloud able. Moreover, cloud absolves services are adopting common businesses of intensive efforts UP SERVICES AND standards—be it for data reprequired to upgrade to the newMAKING APPLICATIONS resentation, application interer versions. System patches faces or for underlying aspects and upgrades, typically, happen AVAILABLE of identification and authenticain the background with user imtion. This has led to possibilities pact reduced to the minimum. Access: SMBs also need 24/7 access to their for SMBs wherein they can leverage a diverse selection applications and data regardless of location or device. of technologies to suit their needs best, and still enjoy Increasingly, businesses rely on their mobile devices a level of integration, single sign-on, etc. Of course, it is (phones or tablets) while on the move, or even at the considerably easy to enable integrated experience if the workplace. While cloud applications, by definition, cloud applications belong to one platform or family, still are available anywhere and at all the times, growing there is a growing number of integrating services and opconsumerization and democratization of Internet access tions that may be used. worrying about (most of) the underpinnings—building, deploying, operating, maintaining, and investing. Thus, the businesses can focus on what technology can deliver, rather than delivering technology. This is a great news for small and medium businesses.

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much better addressed when specialized cloud service providers bring together—scale, skills, and investments. Moreover, reputable cloud application providers have, in general, invested significantly in compliance to security standards, operational best practices, infrastructure redundancies, and people preparedness. Technology Innovation: Much of the new technology development is happening in the realm of cloud. Technology companies like Microsoft have adopted cloud as primary focus, whereas offerings from companies like Google or Amazon have been, almost, entirely cloud based. Many innovative startups which are enabling new use cases and applications are building those for cloud. Be it newer ways of connecting to customers, or more efficient collaboration with an organization—some of the most innovative tools are available as cloud only. No business, regardless of its size, can afford not to consider these technologies. CONCLUSION

Skills Needed: Managing IT, even in an SMB, is very effort intensive. As the number of applications, users and complexity grows, a diverse and relative large set of professionals (whether outsourced or as full-time employees) may be needed. This can include administrators, database experts, network administrators, application developers, hardware technicians, support personnel, etc, apart from technology managers and architects. This could be daunting for most SMBs. The portfolio of technology skills needed with cloud adoption, changes for the better. Cloud enables a business to focus on the purpose and direction of IT—whereas much of the operational, maintenance and support aspects are responsibilities of the cloud service providers. Security: Contrary to the popular perception, cloud applications can be much more secure, especially for small and medium businesses. It is a fact that ensuring security is hard. The applications and infrastructure need to be continuously monitored, maintained and patched; in general remain ahead of looming cyber threats. This requires enormous expertise and expense, which a small or medium sized business might not want to organize. Similarly, more basic threats to application and information availability like power or network outages, simple human errors, hardware failures, etc, are |

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While there are many compelling reasons for cloud adoption by SMBs (and also by larger enterprises to a significant extent), it is important to understand that there are still important caveats. While cloud-first approach makes eminent sense, businesses must consider relevant aspects to decide if a non-cloud option might be appropriate. For example, not all cloud applications have achieved functional parity with their on-premises equivalents. This is especially true with applications involving high levels of customization and integration, like business process automation involving legacy applications. Other considerations could include regulations (location or ownership restrictions on data), bandwidth and quality of connectivity, application performance needs, etc. It is also important to appreciate that cloud adoption can take many forms. While, at times a cloud application might not fit the needs, cloud hosting with dedicated deployment may still be the right choice. Variants of cloud services—infrastructure, platform or application—can bestow a valuable choice, so as choice of going hybrid. This highlights the fact that cloud does not preclude the need for IT and architectural expertise. As such, with right expertise and adoption assistance, SMBs have indeed quite a lot to gain from cloud. The author is Founder and CEO at Advaiya Solutions www.dqindia.com

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Scott Robertson

[email protected]

Why Your Antivirus is Not Enough Anymore Enterprises must look for providers that offer advanced capabilities for proactively detecting and blocking APTs even before they can cause any damage

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or years, you’ve probably been told that you need antivirus to protect your computer. However, with newer and more malicious security threats emerging every day, you may need to rethink your approach to manage such threats. The new breed of malware is more advanced and resistant to the conventional defenses nses and attackers have gotten smarter arter over time. Therefore, your antivirus virus software alone may not be enough ough to combat such malware. Security curity controls need to evolve just as targeted argeted threats have. Malware authors have started using evasive techniques to ensure that their eir programs don’t get easily detected. More importantly, mportantly, they often leverage zero day vulnerabilities—flaws for which no patch is available yet and no signature has been written. Modern malware is often ‘persistent’ sistent’ and designed to stick around in n the network for as long as possible. These new strains of advanced malware e are often referred to as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). IS ANTI-VIRUS LOSING ITS VALUE?

Recent incidents have shown how attackers have found their ways to sidestep traditional antivirus technologies to carry out security breaches and steal data. The security breaches suffered by the New York Times and the US re58

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tailer Target demonstrate the enormous impact such security breaches can have. Soon after the attack, Target suffered a 50% loss in sales, the stock price plummeted and many of the shoppers vowed never shop at the store again. The next generation malware is stealthy and persistent, A CyberMedia Publication

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and has the capability to conceal itself within the enterprise network traffic. It uses techniques such as encrypted communication channels, kernel-level rootkits, and sophisticated evasion capabilities to get past a network’s defenses. This is almost like an arms race. Whenever defenders introduce new detection techniques, attackers look for new ways to bypass them. The traditional antivirus approach, which is used to prevent, detect, and remove or disarm malicious computer programs and malware threats can only protect against the bad software that we already know exists. Engineers and code writers are deployed by security companies to regularly analyze infected files and release patches or updates to deal with new threats as they emerge. But essentially, antivirus is a reactive technology, ie, it only alerts you of something that is already on your computer, once it is discovered. This approach may work well against known viruses, but may not be reliable for dealing with newly-released viruses. DEALING WITH ADVANCED THREATS

Organizations that are serious about protecting data, intellectual property and reputation must look for multi-layered security solutions with advanced capabilities to deal with advanced persistent threats (APTs) that are emerging on the security landscape. Any company that relies only on antivirus to secure its end points could be exposing itself to huge risk. |

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An effective security strategy must include indepth defense and detection capability, an APT incident response plan and recovery strategy. Security solutions have to be more proactive in detecting any suspect piece of code that enters the network and provide the IT team with clear, actionable information. Effective tools have to be deployed to monitor and analyze all files and spot any evasion techniques used by malware. You need to adopt a comprehensive approach such as UTM (Unified Threat Management) with capability to get the deepest level of visibility into malware behavior. While antivirus and intrusion prevention are still a necessary part of any company’s defence, they need to be supplemented with new advanced detection capabilities including: „ Sandbox in the cloud with full system emulation— with the ability to analyze multiple file types „ The ability to go beyond the sandbox to detect different forms of advanced evasions „ Visibility so that your network operations staff and IT team get clear alerts of all detected malware and explanations of why each file is considered malicious „ Not just detection, but the ability to proactively take action and block bad files

The author is Vice President, Asia Pacific, WatchGuard Technologies www.dqindia.com

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Rajiv Bajaj [email protected]

Designing with Big Data Finding an insight amongst all the data points is akin to searching a needle in the haystack. Designers and builders must understand what things mean and how to use all that data

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uman insights and creativity have always been the source of all design innovations. Designing and making originates from what people want, imagine, desire or simply what needs to improve. Humankind’s collective knowledge—learning lessons from mistakes, gathering inputs, innovating, educating, documenting—has driven and influenced every great accomplishment, whether the awe-inspiring skyscrapers, a life-changing product, or a world-defining story. With the advent of human aspirations, design is undergoing a massive data and technology shift. Big data is an unrivaled accumulation of human insights and so much more—consisting of sheer volume, variety, and velocity of collection. The collective insights and data for 62

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designing and creating are not just emanating from our brains the way it’s always been but it’s the entire world and all of our ‘things’, from smartphones to traffic sensors on roads that are feeding data into the designs. Can big data really be harnessed for better design and making things? Will this huge amount of data enable a product or building to improve and update itself without designers starting from scratch? The short answer: Yes. It’s coming in the era of connection and the future of design. COLLECTING DATA IS EASY. MAKING SENSE OF IT IS AN ANOTHER STORY

If we think big data is big now, then the future will be even bigger. A deluge of data is coming from sources like the Internet of Things and the growing network of connected A CyberMedia Publication

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sensors. Those sensors are for a myriad of uses, such as temperature, lighting, and movement, just to name a few. They have become incredibly inexpensive, and storing the resulting data in the cloud is also cheap—so big data becomes massively accessible too. Even so, our technology today is barely keeping pace with all the data that is being stored. Finding an insight amongst all the data points is akin to searching a needle in the haystack. Designers and builders must understand what things mean and how to use all that data. They must analyze and create things in the context of the data and environment that, in turn, will create even further insights and data. That is what the Era of Connection is all about. This is not just about the design of independent, isolated items anymore. Everything is—and will have to be—connected and understood in context. Consider ‘big data’ meeting ‘killer digital models’, and we will be able to foresee the future. The way things are produced— intellectually and physically—is changing. Crowdsourcing and vast global, open collaboration is reaching new heights. Attitudes toward IP are shifting too. With Elon Musk as a prime example, inventors and designers are opening access to patents and IP sharing, helping to drive even further innovation where everyone shares their insights and competes on ideas. Infinite computing and increasing amounts of computational access from the cloud, social, and mobile technologies provides growing access and empowerment. For physical production, the possibilities are endless as the democratization of manufacturing processes is already in full swing. 3D-printing, robotic, and composite materials (just to name a few) are gaining incredible momentum, from prototyping to part development to full-blown production. There’s a more flexible global supply chain and easier access through distributed digital networks. More of the capital that fuels innovation—money and ideas—is available than ever before through crowdfunding and big data. Investment can happen on a grassroots level—not just waiting for a VC, company, or government decision. The ‘Era of Connection’ means designing for an ever-increasing web between people, technology, and the world around them. People are connecting to each other through crowdsourcing/funding, social networks, mobile, and more. They’re connecting to their technology, technology is connecting to technology, and technology is sensing the surrounding world and feeding it back to |

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people. Increasing access to unfathomable amounts of big data and the computing power to use it will deliver even more pertinent information to our connections. THE FUTURE OF BIG DATA—AND WHAT WE CAN DO WITH IT

Firstly, industries and organizations will all know about how things like buildings, highways, products, or games actually work in reality and in real-time (as opposed to how they thought they might). At the same time, sensor systems can be aggregated to each other, connecting information and operation. Collecting actual information about performance creates baselines and understanding for subsequent designs or immediate updates. The new Tesla Model S embodies the beginning of this idea. It includes sensors and a sonar system to recognize surroundings, along with incredible automation such as changing lanes if the driver turns on the signal and a space is free. Aside from the gee-whiz factor, Tesla is on the bleeding-edge of the self-improving product. Gone are the days of waiting for years to improve the driving experience and buying a whole new model. Tesla keeps its cars Internet-connected, so software updates can download automatically. In turn, the autos feed data, including the sensor information, back to the company. The new model will also return more of the sensor data to deliver upcoming features to its Autopilot system, furthering the potential of autonomous driving. So designing the sensor system and its feedback loop will be as important as the design of the physical object itself. Devices, machines, objects, everything is going to be listening to and talking with each other, without any help or guidance from humans. Take the new GE wind turbine as another great example of a product continually improving “without starting from scratch.” It collects wind data, which is fed into a computer where an algorithm determines what it needs to do in order to improve performance. That’s not too new a concept, but here’s where it gets interesting. The turbine also communicates it to all the other turbines to improve performance across the fleet. As the performance-based big data begins to accumulate (and be stored, indexed, and accessible), design assertions can be connected to a promise of performance. The author is Head, Manufacturing, Autodesk India www.dqindia.com

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Ed Nair [email protected]

Betting Big on Hybrid Cloud EMC is pitching the hybrid cloud high as the means to redefine IT infrastructure for SMAC while its Pivotal platform helps do the same for big data and agile applications

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he thrust of the annual EMC Forum at New Delhi was clearly on hybrid cloud. EMC engineers provided a live demo of hybrid cloud which they claimed to have set up in nearly the record time of 30 hours. The demo attracted attention and was the center stage of the show. The demo was close on the heels of the company announcing the availability of the EMC enterprise hybrid cloud solution, delivering hardware, software and services from EMC and VMware. The hybrid cloud solution enables ITas-a-Service (ITaaS) in as few as 28 days, the company claims. The key benefit offered is that organizations no longer will have to make tradeoffs between the speed and 64

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agility of public cloud services and the control and security of private cloud infrastructure. EMC played out its serious foray into the cloud market by announcing collaboration with cloud service providers Netmagic, Tata Communications and Sungard as part of a larger effort to target the cloud market opportunity in India, which is estimated to be $1 bn by 2015, according to Greyhound Research. EMC is working with each cloud service provider to offer customers a consolidated, customer-focused approach to designing, architecting, and running a hybrid cloud to deliver the speed and agility of public cloud services, with the control and security of private cloud infrastructures. The collaboration will focus on A CyberMedia Publication

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INDUSTRY | IN FOCUS

Cloud has a particular strategic importance in the Indian market. Our strategic alliance with service providers will enable us to transform IT today and into the future —Rajesh Janey President, India and Saarc EMC

customers in the manufacturing, healthcare, retail, BFSI, and IT/ITeS sectors. At the event, Rajesh Janey, President, India and Saarc EMC said, “Cloud has a particular strategic importance in the Indian market. Our strategic alliance with service providers will enable us to transform IT today and into the future. Our combined hybrid cloud proposition enables our customers to adopt a true IT-as-a-Service model and change the way they run IT. With the huge market opportunity in front of us and 76% of our customers looking to implement hybrid cloud solutions, we are looking at a bullish roadmap to be one of the top 3 players in India in hybrid cloud segment by 2017.” More than 40,000 EMC engineering hours were invested to deliver hardware, software, and services solution designed to accelerate time-to-value and enable the deployment of an enterprise hybrid cloud in as few as 28 days. The solution offers public cloud interoperability with VMware vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other EMC-powered cloud service providers. David Webster, President, Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC said, “EMC has been at the forefront of translating vision into reality for our customers. Today’s announcement is a step toward ensuring our customers are able to leverage the power of cloud to meet their specific business requirements.” “Our objective is to make it simpler for IT organizations to deploy well-run hybrid clouds in a matter of days, and providing the same or even better agility and efficiency benefits to public clouds.” |

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IDC qualifies EMC’s move into the hybrid cloud as a differentiator. The IDC report (IDC MarketScape: “Worldwide Cloud Professional Services 2014 Vendor Analysis) states, “EMC’s federation of businesses (including EMC Information Infrastructure, VMware, Pivotal and RSA) is a differentiator. By engaging with EMC’s services team, customers have easy access to a pool of knowledge and expertise across the federation, across multiple disciplines that are required to enable a software-defined enterprise. For example, EMC’s new hybrid cloud solution provides customers an option to ‘buy’ a Hybrid Cloud (versus build one); it includes converged storage infrastructure (with EMC and VMware components), EMC’s data protection suite, and a management and orchestration layer in conjunction with VMware—all of which can be implemented and optimized by EMC Global Services.” The company has been on a spree of acquisitions to boost up its cloud portfolio. It acquired Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning to accelerate OpenStack-powered hybrid clouds, extend data protection to the cloud and assure availability and data protection for ‘born in the cloud’ applications. SMAC—REDEFINING IT

At the EMC Forum 2014, the company revealed the findings of its annual survey on enterprise IT trends. The key points that emerged from the survey are: „ People want to interact online, anytime and from anywww.dqindia.com

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where leading to rise of mega trends of cloud, mobile, social, and big data „ 95% believe CXOs see IT as strategic business driver, more than ever before „ Respondents in India are deploying cloud, mobile, social and big data technologies to enhance customer experience (51%), automate processes (41%), and to improve capabilities for sales and marketing (38%) „ Despite this, only 70% of respondents believe IT has the skills to achieve business priorities „ In the future, IT will continue to play a key role in growing the business—85% say that they will become inhouse providers of on-demand services Summarizing the findings of the survey, Janey, said, “SMAC challenges enterprises to take advantage of the positive disruptions of the digital ecosystems. These technologies are quickly changing the way companies relate to their customers, interact with employees, and bring products and services to market as is highlighted by the survey. It is clear, that in order to redefine their business, IT departments will need to continuously develop skillsets that will help them keep up with innovation.” Enterprises are clearly in the midst of effecting a large scale transformation of IT infrastructure. Dmitri Chen, COO and VP Specialty Sales, APJ at EMC says that the usual path that CIOs take is this: a) virtualize everything b) optimize your private cloud c) Identify and shift safe applications to the public cloud d) check back and reoptimize private cloud and e) deploy hybrid cloud. The process looks very simple, but it requires the CIO to make many decisions and answer many questions. Some of the key considerations during this transformation is to know how to provide data protection and availability regardless of where the data resides, what is the approach to data security and compliance strategy, and many such critical areas. The process is not a series of steps as it seems, it is a transformation of the IT infrastructure to respond to modern business needs, Dmitri says. He adds that companies like EMC are the best equipped to handle this. PIVOTAL POWER

As a company, Pivotal is an interesting play that future powers the entire EMC Federation. EMC defines Pivotal as the company at the intersection of big data, PaaS, and agile development. It starts with Pivotal CF, a turnkey 66

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platform-as-a-service, powered by Cloud Foundry, solution for agile development teams to rapidly update and scale applications on a private cloud that can be instantly expanded and upgraded with no downtime, allowing enterprises to innovate with disruptive speed. Says Arun Ramachandran, Country Manager, Pivotal India, “The top management of every industry is now waking up to the fact that organizations need to be data driven and to be fast at that. These are cases where Pivotal solutions fit in nicely. The technology helps to create multiple layers of data consumption and then multiple application delivery routes on top of that.” Arun says that apps, data, and analytics form a trio, but people have a siloed mentality which often leads to loss of value. For example, you deliver fantastic analysis but if it doesn’t get used, it is loss of value. CIOs are often faced with questions—how do I consume analytics data, how can I develop applications with agility, what assets do I need, and such. This is where Pivotal comes in, says Arun. Citing examples of Pivotal customers in India, Arun referred to the case of the largest exchange in the country beset with problems related to huge data volumes, like 800 mn messages per day, which is as much data volume as a telecom service provider. Pivotal managed to transit them from traditional vendors on to the Pivotal platform, which essentially meant moving nearly 80TB of data in record five months. Pivotal had earlier announced the release of major capabilities in Pivotal GemFire 8. Pivotal’s Big Data Suite includes this new release of Pivotal GemFire, a distributed in-memory data management solution for enterprises creating high-scale custom applications. Pivotal claims that GemFire advances its mission to make it easy for modern software developers to integrate data to create new classes of enterprise applications. Indian Railways is one of the reference customers for Pivotal GemFire. Suneeti Goel, Chief Project Engineer, Center for Railway Information Systems, vetoed, “CRIS uses Pivotal GemFire to support high concurrent transactions for reservations and ticket purchases in the newly launched Indian Railways next-generation e-ticketing system. The scalability and resilience features in GemFire have helped us increase the capacity and availability of our service.” A CyberMedia Publication

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ENTERPRISE | REAL CASE

Jasmine Kohli

[email protected]

Banking the Unbanked Adarsh Credit Co-Operative Society is leveraging mobility solutions to empower the low-income population in the far-flung rural areas of the country

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ndian banking sector today is grappling with the issue of financial inclusion. The grave situation of rural banking can be gauged from a report by National Sample Survey Organization, which states that 51.4% of the 89.3 mn farmer households in the country have no access to credit. As per census figures, just 145 mn of India’s 247 mn households have access to a bank account. While only a few rural residents have access to bank accounts, there are about 930.2 mn mobile subscribers in the country. This is the key reason why India’s leading multi-state co-operative society, Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society, turned to the mobile platform to fulfill its vision of delivering banking services at the doorstep of low-income groups in rural areas. “The task of financial inclusion is gigantic. To achieve this, we need to think beyond traditional ways and delivery channels. As a mobile handset is the lifeline of every Indian, we have decided to use the medium to reach a common man without a bank account. With the implementation of the mobile banking service, we have been able to efficiently and transparently execute doorstep

banking,” says Himanshu Shah, CTO, Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society. REACHING OUT

In order to provide doorstep banking to population in Indian villages, Adarsh gave phablets installed with SAP Sybase 365 to its more than 100,000 financial advisors that go door-to-door in some of the remotest villages of India. The app is used for direct collection from customers and the transaction happens in real-time. As soon as the transaction happens, the customer gets an update about the balance. The mobile app is secure, scalable, and easily integrates with bank’s other core-banking systems. The app has the capability to work in both: Online and offline mode, enabling advisors to work seamlessly in areas with low connectivity. “Earlier, for depositing money, customers had to travel to brick and mortar branches of banks, stand in queues, fill the pay-in slips, wait for the token and then deposit money. Today, the bank visits the customers and collects the money; within no time, the money gets reflected in the customer’s account. The app has led to higher visibility of

Through our branches and over 100,000 financial advisors, we have reached 1 mn customers. The app has resulted in 20% increase in the productivity of advisors and has reduced our operational cost —Himanshu Shah CTO, Adarsh Credit Co-operative Society

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ENTERPRISE | REAL CASE

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HOW THE APP WORKS

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The landing page of the mobile app lists several options from which an advisor can choose an action he needs to perform

In the DDS (daily deposit scheme) collection page, the advisor needs to enter the branch code, pop code, and the amount collected. As soon as the transaction happens, the customer gets an update about the balance

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In case of RD (recurring deposit) collection, the advisor needs to enter the branch code, product type, customer account, certificate number and amount collected. This amount gets reflected in the customer’s account in real-time

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In the ‘feedback’ page of the app, customers can share their opinion and experience regarding the service

the cash flow,” asserts Shah. Adarsh completed the project implementation in three months in various phases. “We started with region wise implementation and then the project was rolled out panIndia,” says Shah. To ensure secure transactions, the app has a robust security mechanism with a two-level authentication process. In case there is no data connection, an SMS is sent in an encrypted form. Today, through its branches and over 100,000 financial advisors, Adarsh has reached 1 mn customers. |

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5

5 The app also allows customers to share complaints, if any

Thanks to the app, on an average Adarsh’s advisors are able to meet 250 people daily for financial transactions. The app has thus resulted in 20% increase in the productivity of advisors and has reduced operational cost. Adarsh’s initiative is definitely a step in the right direction to extend financial inclusion to remote rural areas of the country and is in alignment with RBI’s goal of creating a cashless society. It is also a perfect example of how mobility can be leveraged to deliver banking services to the bottom of the pyramid. www.dqindia.com

February 28, 2015 | 69

ENTERPRISE | DIG DATA

Charu Murgai [email protected]

More Analytics, Better Decisions, Less Intuition Your decisions change the course of your business. And decision making ‘as usual’ may not be right for the task. You need more data to understand what was previously unknown. Sophisticated analytical tools are available to you to ‘see’ a wider range of possibilities and evaluate them quickly. A report by PwC gives insights on how many of the technology executives are fully prepared to make big decisions

Is the senior management ready to make the important decisions?

Few see their senior management as fully prepared to make the most important decision they need to make in the next 12 months

15%

59%

Somewhat Fully prepared Fully preparedSomewhat prepared prepared 70

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24%

2%

Moving from unprepared Unprepared Moving from unprepared Unprepa to prepared

to prepared

A CyberMedia Publication

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ENTERPRISE | DIG DATA

The bigger the stakes, the bigger the difference that sophisticated analytical capabilities can make. Below are the top goals for the technology executives for the next 12 months

Top goals for big decisions, next 12 months Grow an existing business

52%

Enter a new industry or start a new business

36%

Shrink an existing business

33%

Corporate restructuring

31%

Collaborate with competitors

29%

Change to an existing business model

29%

A major investment in the business

26% $

Brand positioning

26%

No time for indecisiveness

Among technology executives, next 12 months

JAN MAR MAY JUL SEP NOV

FEB APR JUN AUG OCT DEC

new opportunity

53% expect to make a big decision at least once per month

28% say their most important decision will be based on a new opportunity they simply can’t ignore

20% estimate the value of their most important big GHFLVLRQDV86ELOOLRQRUPRUHLQIXWXUHSURƂWDELOLW\

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3-6

months

A CyberMedia Publication

20%

>US$1bn

51% plan to revisit their most important big decision within 3-6 months to adjust for new information

13%

17%

43%

$250m – $1bn

$50m – $250m

<$50m

www.dqindia.com

6% too GLIƂFXOW to value

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ENTERPRISE | DIG DATA

Both Analytics and Intuition Matter

Which did you rely on most for the last big decision you made?

43% 29%

28%

My own experience and intuition

Relevant experience of others

Data and analytics inputs

What Prevents Deciders from Making Greater Use of Data and Data Analysis

data

skills

?

?

26% Senior management lacks the necessary skills or expertise

?

26% There is a limited direct EHQHƂWWRP\NLQGRIUROH

Seeing limits: Technology executives still have a OHDUQLQJFXUYHRQKRZWRPDNHJUHDWHUXVHRIGDWDDQG analytics when making big decisions.

72

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? ?

39%

29% ,WpVGLIƂFXOWWRDVVHVV ZKLFKGDWDLVWUXO\XVHIXO

The quality, accuracy or FRPSOHWHQHVVRIWKHGDWD isn’t high enough

Why it matters: 7RRPXFKLQIRUPDWLRQFDQKXUWGHFLVLRQ PDNLQJLILWGLVWUDFWV\RXWDNHVWRRORQJRULVQRWQHHGHG Think instead: Technology companies will innovate here. :HH[SHFWWKH\ZLOOXVHDYDULHW\RIPHDQVWRLPSURYH ZKDWGDWDLVFROOHFWHGVWRUHGDQGDQDO\VHGIRUEXVLQHVV intelligence.

A CyberMedia Publication

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ENTERPRISE | DIG DATA

Where Change in Decision Making is Starting to Happen

?!

We’ve changed the way we approach big decision making as a result of big data or analytics

63%

21%

17%

Yes

No, but plan to do so

No, or don’t know

Top three changes, last 24 months

Used new, richer sets of data

Employed a dedicated data insights team to inform strategic decisions

Relied on enhanced data analytics such as simulation, optimisation, or predictive analytics Source: PwC’s Global Data & Analytics Survey 2014

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A CyberMedia Publication

www.dqindia.com

February 28, 2015

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LAST MATTER

Ed Nair [email protected]

Every Company Is A...

A

t a recent meeting with a senior executive at a global IT services company, I asked about the biggest dynamic of change affecting both his customers and his own company. His reply sounded like a cliche he admitted, but he said that there was no better way to put it. He said, “Every company is a tech company.”

The statement is a very telling one that accurately reflects the reality, even if metaphorically for many companies. I got curious about the origins of the statement and its variations. Here’s what I gathered: “Every business is a digital business”- Accenture “Every company is a tech company”- Jon Brune, O’Reilly “Every company is a software company”- David Kirkpatrick, Techonomy “Every company is a technology company”- Mark Raskino and Peter Sondergaard, Gartner “There’s no such thing as a tech company anymore”- David Yanofsky, Quartz The key thrust of all these statements is the role and impact of technology on business. That technology is no longer just the enabler of business; it is the driver of business. The statement embodies most of the trends we see in technology—SMAC, IoT, digital transformation, consumerization, service-oriented IT, and such and how it applies to business. The immediate and obvious manifestation of this paradigm is evident in eCommerce companies, digital companies, and new business models like Uber. The implications are readily understood. The difficulty comes in when you have to apply it to existing industries to transform them. For both CIOs and tech vendors, this paradigm is a double-edged sword. The challenge is to come out of the confines of the world of technology and step up to solving real business problems using technology and inventing completely new business models for the future. The opportunity is to raise the profile of the behind-the-walls IT organization and seize larger territory in the corporate landscape. For technology vendors, the challenge is to acquire the capability to understand and solve business problems using technology and the opportunity is to craft and deliver totally new value propositions to customers. But wasn’t all this already known? Yes. Yet, the statement is a powerful reminder of the predominant role of technology in business and the change in mindset that is required. For the CIO, this means much more than being an advocate of technology for the rest of the enterprise. The options are many—the CIO could choose to be the customer experience champion, the CIO could be the business strategist and business architect, the CIO could be handling technology related M&A, and the CIO could get in and transform the entire business function or two and get out to do something else. Act now!

Ed Nair Editor-at-large 74

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