Channelworld Magazine February 2013 Issue

FOCAL POINT: A new year is upon us, but threats and breaches will persist. What new threats should companies watch out for? PAGE 47

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n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

Tried Selling Ideas?

THE EARLY 90s were bleak years for Macaholics like me, particularly in India. The absence of soft-ware and the limited number of other Mac users meant that the gloom only lifted when the odd

copy of Macworld UK with a CD full of demos, trials, and shareware got past the customs authorities (since software, free or not, attracted hefty import tariffs). At close to Rs 600 a magazine, it was an expensive way for a newbie journalist to sustain a PowerMac. But, then the magazine wasn’t just a com-pilation of freeware, it had great articles and columns, with

one particular columnist’s opinions so remarkable that they’ve remained stuck in my head since.

That columnist, dubbed ‘Wise Guy’ by the folks at Macworld, was Guy Kawasaki. For instance, in 1993, even as the first PDAs were hitting the market, Guy was writing about the need for a PDA that would have apps, and “would replace his cell phone, and, for all but the heaviest writing, my PowerBook.” Eerily perceptive, huh?

Guy has been many things in life—Apple evangelist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, speaker and author—and it’s this rich experience that flows through whatever he does, and specifically his tenth book, Enchantment.

He defines enchantment as the process of delight-ing people with a product, service, organization or

idea. And, he’s had a long history of doing that; as Apple’s Chief Evangelist in the mid-80s, he was tasked with convincing software vendors to develop for the MacOS. Guy was so good, that he also charged up us-ers like me into plumping for the Mac.

The book is meant to be read and experienced as a journey. A journey of change, and a journey of influence, which will help you transform people’s hearts, minds and actions.

Distinguishing between influence and enchant-

ment, Guy said in a recent interview: “You can influ-ence me and you can woo me and you can persuade me, but when you enchant me, that means that I’m head over heels in love. It’s the difference between like and love.”

Peppered with an-ecdotes and personal stories, Enchantment, is about the why of creating ‘wow’ experiences and the how and the what. The whole deal is to captivate the hearts and minds of your audience by making them feel important and involved—a community of fans; a support base that will root for you.

Enchantment, can obvi-ously be a great way to pick up tips for brand-building, marketing, cus-tomer relations, and sales efforts. So it’s a great buy for those in marketing and sales. But what about con-cepts, and thoughts, and

positions? I believe the book will be an invaluable asset to all solution pro-viders in fine-tuning how to pitch their ideas bet-ter and how to get buy-in from clients.

Of course, Guy doesn’t suggest that you pitch snake oil. Far from that, the essence of this book lies in the way it serves to foster strong relation-ships. He spells out that only a “knowledge-able, competent, likeable, trustworthy person” is enchanting.

I particularly liked his techniques of using both push and pull methods like Twitter and Linke-dIn to achieve this. But, more than that I loved his chapter ‘Think Japanese’, with its emphasis on understatement and soft-sell, and its advocacy of avoiding ‘bull shitake’, the art of spreading lies, and unfounded conclusions in a brazen manner.

Ultimately, what the book makes you realize is that selling a solution is transactional, but getting buy-in into an idea, is about building relationships.

I recommend this book to all readers of Channel-World. If there’s one book that you read this year, make sure it’s this one.

Go out there, plant some ideas, watch them bloom, and grow your business. nVijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at [email protected]

nThe book makes you realize that selling a solution is transactional, but getting buy-in into an idea, is about building relationships.

FEBRUARY 2013 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD 1

■ NEWS DIGEST05 It’s a Ticking Time-Bomb | The majority of UK organizations now

employ server virtualization, but new research reveals that there may be a significant shortfall in their software licensing compliance.

06 Windows 8 Fails to Lift the PC Market | Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS failed to provide a spark to PC sales during last year’s fourth quarter, with worldwide unit shipments falling by 6.4 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011.

07 HP Crowned King, Dethrones Lenovo | In its battle for the top spot in the rocky PC industry, HP has edged out rival Lenovo to take back its leadership position.

■ NEWS ANALYSIS10 Making Their First Move | They may have been late to chalk

out plans, but Juniper Networks has finally decided to give a voice to its SDN vision.

■ OPINION01 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran believes that Guy Kawasaki’s new book, Enchantment, should be read by all solution providers this year.

18 Steven Vaughan-Nichols: As we tread deeper into an era of increased app and device usage, our ‘personal computer’ is getting mired in the web of vendor lock-in.

InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ FEBRUARY 2013

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

■ THE GRILL15 Zach Nelson, President and Chief

Executive Officer, NetSuite, talks

about the company’s supremacy as a

SaaS player and beating competition.

■ FEATURE44 Think On Your Feet In the new ‘fail fast and move on’ world of business, IT is learning to quickly tap into creative ideas and harness the power of innovation for competitive advantage. Developing the “next big thing” requires fearlessness, and a fascination with new ideas.

■ FAST TRACK14 Yogesh Mehta, Director, Sysware Infotech, says that a focus on service delivery is what drives the company.

24

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■ COVER STORY

24 50 Hot Companies Technology is changing rapidly, coercing vendors—large and small—to be innovative and stay relevant to changing customer demands. The big and popular companies with their deep pockets manage to stay ahead of the tech curve by re-engineering their legacy solutions. At the same time, hordes of companies, sprouting daily, aim to compete and usurp these tech giants. Here are 50 promising technology firms that are ready to move into the next level of enterprise space.

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CHANNELWORLDGeetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, IndiaCHANNELWORLD.IN

Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’MelloAssociate Publishers Rupesh Sreedharan, Sudhir Argula■ EDITORIALEditor-in-Chief Vijay RamachandranExecutive Editors Gunjan Trivedi, T.M. Arun Kumar Associate Editor Yogesh GuptaDeputy Editor Sunil ShahAssistant Editor Online Varsha ChidambaramSpecial Correspondents Radhika Nallayam,Shantheri MallayaPrincipal Correspondents Gopal Kishore, Madana PrathapSenior Correspondents Anup Varier, Sneha JhaCorrespondents Aritra Sarkhel, Debarati Roy, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi Chief Copy Editor Shardha SubramanianSenior Copy Editor Shreehari Paliath Copy Editor Vinay KumaarLead Designers Jinan K.V., Suresh Nair, Vikas KapoorSenior Designer Unnikrishnan A.V.Designers Amrita C. Roy, Sabrina Naresh

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■ EVENTS & AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENTSenior Manager Projects: Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Manager Tharuna PaulSenior Executive Shwetha M.Project Co-ordinator Archana Ganapathy

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Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. Editor: Louis D’Mello, Printed At Manipal Press Ltd, Press Corner, Manipal-576104, Karnataka, India.

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Emerson Network Power India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . BC

Boston Limited(India) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Cisco Systems(India) Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IBC

Cyberoam Technologies Pvt. Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Epson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

IBM India Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IFC, 8 & 9

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ADVERTISERS’ INDEX

■ FOCAL POINT

47 On GuardSECURITY: Last year, the tech world saw a large number of high-profile attacks and data breaches, and security experts say threats will evolve and escalate this year. But will this finally be the year that mobile malware leaves its mark? What other new threats lay on the horizon?

50 Stay SafeSECURITY: Among your typical New Year’s resolutions—lose weight, stop smoking, be happier—you should consider making some pledges to better secure your digital life. You might even be healthier if you can prevent the stress of a digital disaster, like malware wiping out your PC, having your online accounts hacked, or becoming a victim of identify theft because of a phishing scam or data theft. With that in mind, here are some security resolutions you should consider for the new year.

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

InsideINDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ FEBRUARY 2013

19 Ashutosh Karkhanis, Director, Askari Infotech, says that his company is well on course to grow its topline revenues by at least 40 percent this fiscal compared to the last.

■ ON RECORD 20 Stephen Miles, Vice President, Service Assurance, APAC, CA Technologies, talks about

the company’s role as an innovator in the converged infrastructure space.

■ FACE OFF 52 Print Run: In the race to control the managed printing services space, who will finish first?

47

PAGE 06: Windows 8 Fails to Lift the PC Market

PAGE 06: No Passwords Needed?

PAGE 07: HP Crowned King, Dethrones Lenovo

PAGE 10: Making Their First Move

WHAT’S WITHIN

F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT C H A N N E L W O R L D . I N

News

VIRTUALIZATION

It’s a Ticking Time-Bomb

2013 will see cloud computing continue to grow rapidly, and data will be the new cloud computing oil, according to ‘trends to watch’ reports by independent research firm, Ovum.

In its 2013 Trends to Watch: Private and Public Clouds report, it drills down into not only private and public cloud trends, but also IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS trends. Ovum said that cloud computing services, and the social and mobile applications

that cloud platforms underpin, generate a lot of data, which in turn, requires cloud services and applications to make sense of it.

It claimed the trend connects and fuels other industry trends such as the Internet of things, open government data, consumerization of IT, and big data.

By Hafizah Osman

Fueling the Cloud

CLOUD

Nineteen percent of re-spondents said they don’t do anything, and 39 percent use an IT asset management (ITAM) or procurement system to track licenses, which is often too simplistic in its licensing analysis to factor in the implications of virtualized environments.

According to Matt Fisher, director at License Dash-board, virtualization means that organizations operate many instances of a software program on a single physical machine. However, tradition-al software licenses require the organization to license each machine separately.

“While many vendors, have added user-centric elements to their licensing terms, licensing under vir-tualization remains a grey area,” he said. “As a result, li-censing each virtual machine separately is often the safest approach to avoid the risk by being non-compliant.”

Fisher said the issue be-comes even more compli-cated with technologies such as VMware’s Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS), which dynamically allocates IT resources to the highest priority applications. This means that an application has the potential to be used on every virtual machine if the need arises.

“Based on our own analy-sis of customer’s virtualized environments, DRS could increase an organization’s server licensing require-ments by up to 500 percent at the flick of a switch.”

This is not only a sig-nificant additional licensing cost for the organization to bear, but if left unchecked, exposes the organization to a hefty fine for non-compli-ance when it is next audited.

“DRS has the potential to be a ticking time bomb for many organizations, so we urge them to review how their software is deployed in virtualized environments or risk facing significant fines in 2013,” concludes Fisher.

— By Sophie Curtis

THE MAJORITY of UK organizations now employ server virtualization, but

new research reveals that there may be a significant shortfall in their software licensing compliance, according to software asset management firm License Dashboard.

In a straw poll conducted among its customers in December 2012, 87 percent said that virtualization is factored into their software asset management (SAM) strategy, yet only 42 percent use a dedicated licensing so-lution for the task.


-

Cisco has appointed Jeff White as president of its India and SAARC operations. He will assume leadership for Cisco’s sales and operation in the region. White will also take on the role of leader of a new India Board, which comprises senior executives from Cisco’s headquarters, as well as India.

Telerik announced its plans and goals for expansion within India. Company’s senior executives presented their approach, which included details about Telerik and its global strategy, as well as plans for the Indian market.

Dell’s Global Commercial Channel (GCC) announced the launch of the Dell Engineers Club in India, as part of their long-term commitment to channel partners in the country. This club will help train channel partners and their engineers to be knowledgeable in Dell’s advanced server, storage, security and networking.

devices like smartphones and tablets, which are being used increasingly for basic computing, Web browsing, video and email.

Global PC shipments in the fourth quarter to-taled 89.8 million units, compared to 95.9 million units in the fourth quarter

of 2011. Ship-ments fell by 6.4 percent year-on-year, while IDC originally projected a 4.4 percent decline.

Windows 8 has a new touch user

interface that is significant-ly different from Windows 7. But PC makers failed to communicate the benefits of the new operating sys-tem, said Jay Chou, senior research analyst at IDC.

The demand for PCs with touchscreens has been lackluster, and demand could grow as more touch models become available

this year, Chou said. Con-sumers expected a larger number of tablets and touch PCs with Windows 8 in the fourth quarter, but only saw traditional PCs not opti-mized for touch.

Another problem has been the high prices for ultrabooks, a new class of thin and light PCs backed by Intel.

“As Windows 8 matures, and other corresponding variables such as ultrabook pricing continue to drop, hopefully the PC market can see a reset in both messaging and demand in 2013,” Chou said.

Windows 8 laptop ship-ments were also poor as companies tried to clear off the remaining inventory of Windows 7 laptops, IDC said. During the holiday shopping season, a large number of laptops with Windows 7 were available in US retail stores.

HP was the top PC ven-dor worldwide, and the company’s shipments sta-bilized after a few quarters of precipitous drops as the company was dealing with instability in its PC division.

— By Agam Shah

Short TakesOPERATING SYSTEM

Windows 8 Fails to Lift the PC Market

MICROSOFT’S WINDOWS 8 OS failed to pro-vide a spark to

PC sales during last year’s fourth quarter, with world-wide unit shipments falling by 6.4 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011, according to research by IDC.

Windows 8, the successor to the popular Windows 7, was released in late October, with PCs and tablets with the new OS shipping almost immediately after. But PC demand continued to be sluggish and the new OS failed to provide a spark, IDC said in a statement.

The problem was com-pounded by challenging economies and people hold-ing back on spending to upgrade PCs, IDC said. The PC market also took a back-seat to alternate computing

To help the Internet move on from usernames and passwords, Google wants to put a ring on it.

Google’s engineers have been experimenting with hardware that would act as a master key for online services. Examples include a smart ring for your finger, a cryptographic USB stick, or a token embedded in smartphones.

Google vice president of security Eric Grosse and engineer Mayank Upadhyay outline their proposal in a

research paper for IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, according to a report in Wired.

The idea is to prevent remote hackers from accessing online accounts through stolen usernames and passwords. Without physically stealing the login device, they’d have no other way to gain entry.

Some Web services already offer this type of security through two-step authentication.The prob-lem with two-step authentication

is that it’s cumbersome to validate all your computers, and to go through the process just to check e-mail on a friend’s computer.

Of course, relying on a ring or other device to log in raises its own challenges. There’d have to be a backup sign-in method—one

that’s more secure than just a password—in case the device becomes lost or damaged. And while a ring or other contact-based device would help protect users from faraway hackers, it’d be easier to steal by spouses, co-workers or children. Google’s engineers admit that they might still need to require passwords, but those passwords wouldn’t have to be as complex as today’s hacker-proof formulae. Also, not everyone will want to wear a ring or carry their phones around all the time just to use their computers.

— By Jared Newman

R&D

STRIKE OUT: Hardware could be the key to a safe online future.

No Passwords Needed?

6.4%The fall in PC

shipments in the Q4’12 compared

to the same quarter last year.

SOURCE: IDC

6 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD FEBRUARY 2013

PERSONAL COMPUTING

HP Crowned King, Dethrones Lenovo

McCormack’s the New CEOWebsense announced that its Board of Directors has named John McCormack as CEO and Board member, effective immediately. He succeeds Gene Hodges.

“John McCormack has taken the lead in the successful execution of our strategic initiatives, enabling us to generate solid fourth quarter billings growth amid the continued expansion of our field sales organization,” said John Carrington, chairman of the Websense Board of Directors.

— ChannelWorld Bureau

Around

The WorldFaster App Delivery, But Less CloudTop priorities in the application development and delivery space this year include faster delivery of software and better alignment with business, according to an annual survey conducted by Serena Software.

The survey involving 86 participants also found a diminished priority for cloud application deployment, with cloud deployments perhaps having already taken hold.

Delivering applications faster has remained the top priority in all three years of the survey, although the percentage who rated this as important dropped from 68 percent last year to 59 percent this year. — Paul Krill

Symantec Software StreamlinedSymantec announced that its software, hereon, will fall into one of three categories: Home and office security, business compliance and continuity of operations. Products will be integrated so customers can choose additional functionality should they need it. Symantec will continue to rely on sales channels to manage current custom-ers, while devoting the internal sales to generating new business.

— Joab Jackson

IN ITS battle for the top spot in the rocky PC industry, HP has edged out rival Lenovo to take

back its leadership position.Last October, HP, which

had long held the number one position in the world-wide PC market, suddenly had a challenger: China-based Lenovo. When third-quarter reports came out, one analysis firm had HP retaining its leadership po-sition, while another firm showed Lenovo grabbing the lead spot.

Now with fourth quarter numbers out, HP’s at the top of both analyst lists again.

“This is a monumental win for HP and it shows that if HP decides to flex their PC muscle, they can at least moderate and even increase share,” said Pat-rick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strat-egy. “This isn’t positive for Lenovo as many market watchers just assumed they would have the No. 1 mar-ket share right now.”

“Because perception’s reality, many will assume something didn’t go as planned for Lenovo,” he said.

Earlier, IDC, which last fall had HP holding a slim third-quarter lead, reported that HP was still atop the list of global PC makers.

And IDC had HP holding its position despite slow-ing sales—shipment totals were 0.6 percent lower than last year while Lenovo’s grew by 8.2 percent.

Gartner, which had given the PC market lead to Leno-vo last fall, reported that HP had reclaimed its position.

Gartner said HP shipped 14.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012, grabbing 16.2 percent of the global market. Lenovo, on the other hand, shipped 13.9 million units last quar-ter, with 15.5 percent of the market.

However, while HP showed 0.5 percent loss between the fourth quarter of 2011 and last quarter, Lenovo showed an 8.2 per-cent growth.

Dell, shipping 9.2 mil-lion units in the fourth quarter, came in third with 10.2 percent of the world-wide market. Acer Group came in fourth with 8.6 million units shipped and 9.5 percent of the market.

The shift, Moorhead said, came down to HP making several strong moves and Lenovo not maintaining its momentum.

“First, HP launched a compelling assortment of products for the spring refresh, which was lev-eraged into the holiday selling cycle,” he added.

“Secondly, HP stuck to the fundamentals, which were to offer a broad lineup at the right prices with the right market development funds, across the board in all regions.”

And that leaves Lenovo in a position to make an-other push for the top spot.

— By Sharon Gaudin


JUNIPER NETWORKS at long last has laid out its software-defined networking

(SDN) strategy, which in-cludes a revamped software licensing plan that the com-pany says will change its business model and differ-entiate it from competitors.

Juniper has been the least vocal of the major network vendors in articu-lating a strategy for attack-ing the SDN market—a market that IDC expects to be worth $3.7 billion (Rs 20,000 crore) in 2016. Last year, rivals Cisco, HP, Bro-cade and Arista all initi-ated plans to harness SDNs in various ways to help customers transition to more flexible, virtualized networking architectures from those dependent on

the proprietary charac-teristics of physical infra-structure. And Alcatel-Lucent recently disclosed funding of a year-old start up company focused on cloud SDNs.

While Juniper in Decem-ber did spend $176 million (about Rs 960 crore) to acquire SDN controller startup Contrail Systems, it has not been forthcom-ing about its overall SDN plans, other than dropping hints and suggestions at financial conferences and offshore trade shows.

That changes now. Ju-niper’s plan includes six principles (see adjoining box) that the company claims address the most pressing challenges facing the networking industry over the next two years.

Making Their First Move

They may have been late to chalk out plans, but Juniper Networks has finally decided to give a voice to its SDN vision.By Jim Duffy

v Separate networking software into four planes—management, services, control and forwarding—to optimize each plane within the network

v Centralize the appropriate aspects of the management, services and control software to simplify network design and lower operating costs.

v Use the cloud for scale and deployment, and enable use-based pricing.

v Create a platform for network apps, services, and integration into management systems.

v Standardize protocols—including OpenFlow—for interoperable, heterogeneous support across vendors.

v Apply SDN principles to all networking and network services, including security, from the datacenter and enterprise campus to service provider mobile and wireline networks.

PRINCIPLES

In addition to the six principles, Juniper outlined four steps customers can take to implement SDNs this year. Those include implementing a single, centralized master network management, analytics and configuration capability for all network devices for comprehensive insight of network operations; creat-ing network and security service virtual machines by extracting service software from hardware and housing it on x86 servers; using a centralized controller that enables service chaining in

6

n NEWS ANALYSIS


soft—and allows the transfer of software licenses between Juniper devices and industry-standard x86 servers to pro-tect customer investments.

The licensing strategy is also designed to allow cus-tomers to scale purchases based on actual usage. Juni-per will announce specific software licensing packages throughout the year, and will transition its software business model by the end of 2015.

The licensing plan dis-tinguishes Juniper’s SDN strategy from Cisco’s and its other competitors. None have articulated a revamped software licensing strategy based on adoption of SDN.

Nav Chander, another IDC analyst, says Juniper will have to sell the new enterprise-based licensing model to its service provider customers, which account for 65 percent of its revenue.

“This is going to be a big change for service provid-ers,” Chander says. “This licensing and pricing plan hasn’t been socialized with that community yet.”

Most of the way Juniper accounts for revenue is from hardware sales, he notes. The new licensing model may shift most of the revenue accountability to software.

Another challenge is to release products in a time-ly manner, Mehra says. There was a long lag time between the introduction of Juniper’s QFabric data-center and cloud switches and shipment, which re-sulted in a slow ramp for the product line.

“They need to speed up products to market,” he says. “Startups and in-cumbents are not waiting. They need to make the right moves and execute on this vision.”

LIKE Cisco and its Insieme Networks project, Alcatel-Lucent has invested in a

start up company focused on SDNs for cloud service providers.

Nuage Networks was estab-lished a year ago to tackle the scalability and automated ser-vice provisioning issues of cloud providers offering hybrid multi-tenant cloud services. Usually, the bottleneck in all of this is the network, and that’s what Nuage is focusing on.

“We want to make sure that the network gets out of the way,” says Sunil Khandekar, Nuage CEO.

Khandekar was the vice president of business develop-ment for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Division.

Like Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Di-vision, Nuage is headquartered in Mountain View. It is staffed not only by Alcatel-Lucent per-sonnel but also with those from the company’s competitors,

like Cisco and Juniper, and Webscale/Web 2.0 and virtual-ization companies, like Yahoo and VMware.

Nuage was not forthcoming on product details—the “official” launch of the company and its products is scheduled for April. But Khandekar said the company is building SDN capa-bilities for “fully automated, full programmable networks” sup-port hybrid cloud services.

Cisco has invested an initial $100 million (Rs 548 crore) in Insieme, with the option to purchase the com-pany for about $800 million (about Rs 4,300 crore). Neither Cisco nor Insieme has disclosed what the startup is working on but it’s believed to be a line of programmable 100G Ethernet switches and a controller, with substantial storage hooks.

Khandekar said the Nuage products will support multi-vendor IP/Ethernet environ-

ments and can be deployed in both greenfield and legacy datacenters. They will require an SDN controller, software embedded in network and compute elements to allow them to be controlled, and knowledge of the network to slice it into multi-tenant segments in a programmable manner, Khandekar says.

The products will support OpenFlow as one of many control protocols, and will be “agnostic” to others like OpenStack, CloudStack, VM-ware vCenter, etcetera. The Nuage products will also be hypervisor agnostic, he says.

Even though Nuage will leverage OpenFlow, it will also go beyond the capabilities of OpenFlow to allow cloud service providers to construct highly scalable, multi-tenant hybrid clouds capable of using different orchestration mech-anisms, Khandekar says.

—By Jim Duffy

Alcatel-Lucent’s Funding an SDN Start Up

software, or the ability to connect services across devices according to busi-ness need; and optimizing hardware for high perfor-mance SDNs.

Analysts say Juniper’s strategy is consistent with the way the rest of the in-dustry is adopting SDNs.

“It seems to be right in line with where the market is and what customer re-quirements are,” says Rohit Mehra of IDC.

Juniper says some of its current Junos Space applica-tions can deliver centralized management. These will be extended and augmented over time.

The controller will be based on the company’s recently announced JunosV App Engine, which will ship this quarter, and the

recently acquired controller technology from Contrail.

Juniper had previously stated that it was looking to coalesce the industry around an open source-based de facto industry standard SDN controller to go up against Cisco’s In-sieme development and the one obtained by VMware through its acquisition of Nicira. But the company’s stance has “evolved” since disclosing that intention last September, says Bob Muglia, executive VP of Juniper’s Software Solutions Division.

Juniper now views open source as an advanta-geous interface technology between controllers, and between controllers and switches, rather than as the core of controller capa-bility, Muglia says.

The controller will be delivered in 2014 and in-clude the software service chaining capability, Muglia says. Juniper’s MX router and SRX security gateway hardware will be optimized for the software service chaining capability, with Juniper’s QFabric datacen-ter and EX series campus switches to follow.

THE DIFFERENTIATORThough the overall strategy is consistent with where the industry’s going, Juniper’s differentiator is the new soft-ware licensing model, which is called Juniper Software Advantage. It is based on enterprise software licensing models—many of Juniper’s top executives, including Muglia and CEO Kevin Johnson, are from Micro-

n NEWS ANALYSIS


YOGESH MEHTA, Direc-tor, Sysware Infotech lived the ordinary life. That was up until he took a leap of faith, and

decided to start a business.“It was a sudden decision on my

part to get into business, leaving behind a regular job in the manu-facturing sector,” says Mehta.

The early phase—given that he knew nothing about running a busi-ness, was not easy. There was a con-stant need to do something out of the ordinary to create a brand image and win mind-share in the systems inte-gration space, and to ensure that the company stayed on top of competition. What worked in Sysware’s favour was the focus on providing service-orient-ed customer support, rather than just adding new accounts.

n FAST TRACK

Sysware Infotech

“We realized that our core strength was going to be our service deliv-ery. It’s been the differentiating factor for us. Even, today, we focus

on quality of business rather than the quantity of business, unlike some of our competitors,” says Mehta.

The association with Tecumseh Products, during the initial days, helped establish Sysware. During that period of its association with Tecumseh, Mehta and his team fixed minor networking issues for them—something which the client’s existing set of service providers were unable to do. Over time, many of Tecumseh’s IT infrastructure issues at its headquarters in Hyderabad were solved by Sysware. Sysware also helped revamp the processes at Tecumseh after winning a hard-fought deal against a systems integration behemoth HCL. The fact that a fledgling SI with no prior industry experience could win such a large deal against an IT giant was an eye-opener. “The entire project was around Rs 35 lakh and was completed in three months. The project gave us a foothold in the industry,” says Mehta.

As a systems integrator, Sysware has developed expertise, and deployed solutions in the hospitality, manufacturing and the corporate sectors, in association with vendors like Cisco and D-link among many others. In the future, Sysware Infotech intends to collaborate and invest in various CCTV vendors to address their set of cost-sensitive customers. n

—Aritra Sarkhel

Founded: 1999

Headquarters: New Delhi

Employees: 46

Revenue 2009-10: Rs 6 crore

Revenue 2010-11: Rs 9.5 crore

Revenue 2011-12: Rs 11 crore

Key Principals: HP, Microsoft, Axis, Genetec, Schneider

Key Business Activities: System integration, consultancy in Security and telephony

Key Technologies: Campus-wide networking, IP telephony, IP surveillance

Website: www.syswareinfotech.com

Snapshot

A focus on service delivery is what drives Sysware Infotech, says director Yogesh Mehta.

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2009-10

Rs 6 cr

Rs 9 Cr

Rs 11 cr

2010-11 2011-12


Dossier

NetSuite is one of the longest-running players in the SaaS market. That gives you the advantage of maturity, but does it also mean that your core architecture is get-ting dated? No. The good thing about NetSuite is that we architected it cor-rectly from the start. Multitenancy out of the gate, that was a very important decision. We chose to make it very

That allowed us to scale up to larger retailers. That was an 18-month re-architecture. I think you’ll see us do a subsystem re-architecture once every 18 months.

Legacy software vendors have often been criticized for letting products slide into “maintenance mode,” with decreasing amounts of new features being added. Is NetSuite spending enough on research and development? Two years ago it was about 14 percent [of revenue]. Since then it’s come down to somewhere in the 12s. However in that time frame we have tripled the number of devel-opers. We do our global development on the NetSuite platform. It allows us to scale research and development, while spending less.

customizable. Not all SaaS applica-tions are customizable. We put deep customization in the first iteration of the architecture. As time has moved on and our customer profile has changed we’ve had to re-architect some of the subsystems to deal with application performance. Last year we introduced SuiteCommerce.

n THE GRILL

President and CEO, NetSuite, talks about SaaS and beating competition.

Zach Nelson,

Name: Zach Nelson

Designation: President and CEO

Company: NetSuite

Present Role: Nelson has been CEO of NetSuite since 2002. He led the company’s successful IPO in 2007 and its rise from startup to a slate of over 6,600 active customers. Under his leadership, NetSuite has grown substantially year-over-year to become a leading cloud computing company.

Career Graph: His career began with executive positions in marketing, sales, product development and business strategy at some of the most influential and innovative technology companies, including Oracle, McAfee and Sun Microsystems.

Major Achievements: At McAfee, Nelson helped lead the company’s expansion into the network management arena with the acquisition of Network General. As CEO of myCIO, he created the world’s first business-to-business security application services provider. He was also VP, World Wide Marketing at Oracle where he was responsible for global marketing strategy and implementation.


n THE GRILL | ZACH NELSON

You’re hiring in other parts of the world, in-cluding the Czech Republic. Is the potential for lower developer salaries there another consideration? It’s not just the lower cost of hiring developers, it’s being able to find them. Hiring in the Bay Area for

developers is a very arduous process. You have to start looking in other locations. However, in the US we have a new development center in progress. We still do a lot of hiring in North America.

NetSuite runs on the Oracle stack. Although it might be un-comfortable given that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is an investor in NetSuite, is there any inter-est in moving off Oracle to other technologies? No. It’s definite-ly not on anyone’s priority list. Oracle is the database of record for most SaaS systems for a reason.

How do you handle deals where you’re competing with Oracle, given your deep relationship?

We don’t really avoid competing di-rectly. If the customer wants to put us and SAP side by side, us and Oracle side by side, we’re going to compete and try to win the deal. I think there’s a natural separation in our strategies so we don’t collide that much.

Oracle likes to talk about what a big ad-vantage its new Fusion Applications have, since the same codebase can run in the cloud or on-premises. NetSuite is all about the cloud, though. Does Oracle have an edge over you with Fusion? Oracle has a different target market than us. That decision of whether to go on-premises or off-premises may be a bigger decision point in the CIO office at those compa-nies. They may want to hug their server. In our companies they don’t want to hug the server, they don’t want to manage these applications. We’re pretty reli-gious about not putting software on site, but I suppose some industries probably require it be on-premises. But I think the segment of the market who wants it on-premises is shrinking.

Our customers have also figured out that if the guy writing the software ac-tually has to run it, they have to write it a lot better.

Is NetSuite in the market to acquire a cloud-based HCM (human capital man-agement) vendor, like SAP did with Suc-cessFactors and Oracle did with Taleo?

Historically, our customers have not been demanding HR solutions. What NetSuite has been designed to do is run business processes. Procure to cash, procure to pay. We rarely, rare-ly get asked for HR. I think you’re seeing the evolution of three core processing clouds that are somewhat independent. One’s an HR process: Finding employees, onboarding them and training them. NetSuite runs an operational process: How does data about sales move through your core transaction processing system? Final-ly there’s the sales force cloud: How do you prospect and find new leads?

HR has certainly not been a prior-ity [for NetSuite]. Is NetSuite inter-ested in managing job reviews? Not really. That said we’re always looking at where the intersection points are. We already do payroll today. We’ll continue to beef up HR in terms of payroll and benefits, but when it comes to talent management and job reviews, it’s not as core. We’ll partner there.

What about analytics? Will NetSuite make any acquisitions in that area? We have good core reporting today. One of the biggest challenges in reports is get-ting the data consolidated so you can visualize it. We solve the big problem, in that [customers’] data is all in one place. We’re delivering real-time BI to all user types today. That said, if you look at the things we’re doing in e-com-merce, the massive amounts of custom-er data, then you might do something different. You might see some new ef-forts in that area of analytics.

You’re growing quickly and beating analysts’ expectations. However, your customer churn rate has been cited as a concern in the past. What is your churn rate today? It’s never been lower in our history. We don’t really give a churn number, but it can’t really get any lower. The churn numbers that we saw [in the past], that was when we were in the very low end of the market. [Such customers] may go out of business 30 percent of the time, so you have 30 percent churn. The primary source of churn now is when one of our custom-ers gets acquired. — By Chris Kanaracus

We don’t really avoid competing

directly. If the customer wants to put us and SAP side by side, us and Oracle side by side, we’re going to compete and try to win the deal.”


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n OPINION

Restricted Access

WHAT DO Apple’s iOS, Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Google’s Android all have in common? None of them work that well without the Internet. This trend has been

developing for years and is now accelerating.Don’t get me wrong. I love the Internet and I like operating systems, such as Google Chrome OS, that require it. But I like having true platform choice even more. I was there for the PC revolution of the 70s and 80s, and I well remember how it undermined the ability of the IT department to control every last bit and byte. I don’t want to go back to the days when users had no control—but I’m afraid that’s exactly what’s happening.

Today, it’s the big vendors that are taking control. Using an iPhone or iPad locks you into the Apple ecosystem. Want to use Adobe Flash? Too bad. Steve Jobs decided he didn’t want you to have it, and that was that.

It’s not much different with other technology choices. From time to time, things might happen that give the impression that everyone is trying to get along. Google, for instance, has got its maps working on iOS devices again, something that also required the goodwill of the keepers of the Apple App Store. Meanwhile, though, Google has decided to pull the rug out from underneath Microsoft.

First, it announced that it won’t release apps for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8. Then, it said that it would no longer support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync free of charge. The net effect of that second decision is to make e-mail and calendering programs—not just for Windows, but also for iOS and Mac OS X—a lot less attractive proposition to users who have committed themselves to

Google’s offerings for their back-end groupware services.

Microsoft, of course, has been playing this game since, well, pretty much forever. To take one recent example, when you first start running Windows 8 or RT, you’re encouraged to set it up with a Microsoft account. It sounds great. “When you sign in with a Microsoft account,” Microsoft tells you, “your PC is connected to the cloud, and many of the settings, preferences, and apps associated with your account can ‘follow’ you between different PCs.”

Let’s say you do that. What happens when you try to start your Windows 8 laptop somewhere without Internet access? You can’t log in. Ain’t that a kick in the head? You have to open a local account and then set everything else back to the way you like it.

In all of these developments, I see signs that we’re heading to a new era of platform lock-in. Your choices will be Apple, Google, Microsoft and possibly Amazon. Each seeks to lock you in not just with its particular devices and applications, but also with Internet services that either aren’t available on other platforms or are very inconvenient to use on other platforms.

Sure, vendor lock-in is nothing new. But let’s not forget that “PC” stands for “personal computer.” If a handful of top vendors are allowed to decide what Internet services we can and can’t run, the “personal” in personal computing will go away. And we will have lost something important. n

As we tread deeper into an era of increased app and device usage, our ‘personal computer’ is getting mired in the web of vendor lock-in.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nicholshas been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was cutting-edge and 300bps was a fast Internet connection. He can be reached at [email protected].

STEVEN J. VAUGHAN-NICHOLS


ASHUTOSH KARKHANIS, at 35, is the founder and director of Askari Infotech. He also hap-pens to be this Pune-

based systems integrator’s oldest member. It just shows that this upwardly-mobile set-up is run by a young and enthusiastic bunch that upholds their motto, You run your business and we’ll run your IT.

Askari, according to Karkhanis, is well on course to grow its topline revenues by at least 40 percent this fiscal compared to the last. More than 90 percent of its revenues emerge from the mid-market (35 percent) and SMB (55 percent) seg-ment. “Our USP lies in the entire

n FAST TRACK

Askari Infotech

team understating the pain points of customers. There on, we take to-tal ownership of IT, including staff-ing, and delivering services and

solutions that are tailored to the needs of each customer,” says Karkhanis.

Managed services, IP telephony, storage, security and surveillance are the key growth areas.Additionally, the company has invested heavily in capability building in new technologies, as well as deepening relationships with all existing customers.

Services (which constitute 30 percent of revenues) is what we focus on, says Sandeep Jinde, direc-tor-Technical, Askari Infotech. “We have a clear strategy where we de-liver all the services required, while product delivery is more of a fulfill-ment. We will continue to work on bettering this model,” he adds.

On the technology front, the company is working on power solutions, cloud and unified communication with multiple vendors. “We have a vision for 2015, where we plan to grow to at least Rs 15 crore in revenues, with 50 percent of it attributed to services,” says Jinde.

The company also plans to have strategic tie-ups to consolidate its position in the Middle East and countries in East Africa.

For Karkhanis, the entrepreneurial path has been fulfilling. He says, “It makes me happy and motivated when I see that I have been able to influ-ence my team members positively.” n

—Yogesh Gupta

Founded: 1998

Headquarters: Pune

Branches: Mumbai, Dubai, Dar es Salaam

Revenue 2011-12: Rs 5.1 crore

Revenue 2012-13 (Expected): Rs 7 crore

Key Executives: Shailesh Yemle, Manager-Pre Sales; Praveen Karnale, Manager-Support

Key Principals: Cisco, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Toshiba

Key Business Activities: IT FMS, outsourced CTO, messaging and communication, MIS solutions, systems integration

Website: www.askari.co.in

Snapshot

Ashutosh Karkhanis, Director, Askari Infotech, says that he is on course to grow its topline revenues by at least 40 percent.

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Sandeep Jinde (L), Director-Technical and Ashutosh Karkhanis, Founder and Director.

TECHNOLOGY SPLIT

SOURCE: ASKARI INFOTECH

25%PCs (desktops and laptops)

30%Services

20%Others

10%Networking

10%Security

5%Storage


VP, Service Assurance, APAC, CA Technologies,

talks about the company’s role as an innovator

in the converged infrastructure

space.By Shantheri Mallaya

Assurance, APAC,

By Shantheri Mallaya

CA Technologies formally announced its converged infrastructure solution as an integral part of its services assurances portfolio a few months ago. What does this bring to the table for customers and what is the way forward for the converged platform in India?MILES: Yes, CA Technolo-gies did formally announce the availability of its next generation infrastructure management product in India. We have about 20 years of experience and market leadership. The new solution has the spectrum to become in-frastructure management version 1.0, with a natural evolution driving it, and the capability to devolve and be driven further as a purpose-built concept.

Infrastructure manage-ment has gone on from traditionally being a bor-

ing and uninteresting piece to becoming one of the most strategic parts of the business. We built the design with multiple, key customers (68), which includes some of the most ambitious large enter-prises and start-ups across the world.

CA Technologies was talking about scouting for acquisitions a while ago in order to enhance its converged infrastructure portfolio across geographies. India was also on the radar. What has happened since?MILES: While we cannot pre-empt the possibility of acquisitions as yet, I can say with some confidence that India is a major operation for us. We look at technolo-gies not only from a sales and marketing point of view, but also from an IT service provider perspec-tive, and from a brand strengthening perspective. The other dimension is the incredible investments in R&D in India. The proxim-ity to prominent universi-ties and technical establish-ments make it viable and lucrative for us to make this a very important ini-tiative worldwide. A large component of the products is delivered from ITC, our R&D facility in Hyderabad. One-third of our total prod-ucts get serviced out of the R&D setup here. The other products within the service assurance family are also being developed out of here. So, that explains how critical India is and contin-ues to be.

With the evolution of the infrastructure layer, how does your converged infrastructure portfolio fit into your larger datacenter strategy?

Stephen Miles,ON RECORD n


MILES: The evolution of in-frastructure has traversed beyond the datacenter; it encompasses enterprise networks and service provider networks. Cross application experiences have changed and the re-quirement around deliv-ery is becoming crucial. For us, infrastructure management is about addressing these require-ments and also recogniz-ing the fact that there are complexities. There are a lot of wannabes there, who claim to do infra-structure management. But, as far as the core capabilities are con-cerned there is no one even close to us, be it next generation analytics or be it in the modules.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has placed CA as an innovator in the infrastructure management space for a while now. How are your discussions with customers driving the innovation story further?MILES: I reiterate that CA Technologies is the only company which has true end-to-end capability. We do network and datacenter system management ex-tremely well. We manage the application layer more comprehensively than any other company. We are the first company to take application performance management (APM) to the infrastructure layer. We are also the first company to blend that and integrate with analytics in a full-blown manner. These aspects are hard to do. We

are helping customers and partners get access to next- generation, revenue-gen-erating infrastructure by making it a part of the same fabric, through the idea of actionable intelligence. The new platform talks about convergence as a unified platform. That is proof of our innovation bandwidth.

The virtual, hybrid cloud is a single platform that

works 25x faster problem resolution. It is bench-marked against industry standards as well as our own products. If CIOs are to be spend 4x or 5x on licensing, the hidden costs can be astronomical. In-stead, they could get onto one platform, and reduce downtime and costs.

The flavor of discussions might be still restricted to the larger enterprises. That essentially keeps your clientele restricted to service providers. MILES: No, not at all. It’s a myth that managing com-plexity is restricted to the large enterprise. For an organization, composite data becomes critical to demystify. As we see it, the difference between the

large enterprise and the smaller organization lies not in the challenges but in the consumption models. Large enterprises would also be looking at alternate models. With the new plat-form, we are also looking at newer routes to market. The emerging enterprise would state the problem, budget and consumption—on premise or otherwise. At a discussion level, we are looking at creating joint so-lutions and looking forward to these conversations more often. Undoubtedly, our service providers are our strong allies. But, they will function at multiple levels through multiple models—they will liaison with the SIs or host the service or resell. This helps them, and

ultimately us, to reach a wider segment of the mar-ket. Our service provider traction and success has been phenomenal.

So, in a very volatile market such as India, how is the service provider community being enabled? What is your approach to this?MILES: We have a team to work with service partners to help them build revenue streams, help them add skills so that they are able to go, deploy, consult, and solve customer painpoints. With the new platform, we will address the needs of customers with simpler architecture. In India, it is a fact that there is a greater flight of talent which means there is a greater need to focus on enable-

ment, training and certi-fication. We are working with the IT service part-ners as global partners. Our global service provid-er (GSP) is a separate focus team. We leverage educa-tion (a separate function) whenever we need.

As a global spokesperson, what is your third person take on the existing and future challenges in this market?MILES: Challenges exist. Certain observations that I have made can be specific or generic. There has been this desire, trend, fashion-able among customers to claim “We outsource everything.” The reality, going forward, is that some of the assets have to be brought back in-house like

strategic components. All said and done, outsourcing is vital. So, it is the hybrid model that will typically take precedence. Ironi-cally, while this gives the organization larger busi-ness control, it poses for an IT manager, a new set of challenges. He needs technology that will drive the process and facilitate optimum decision making. We as a company will have to think ahead for a market like India, 10 years down the line—keeping TCO, BOM and ROI rationaliza-tion as an objective. The market will mature. We are optimistic and confident that the larger message will reach the right people. We have huge expectations from our converged infra-structure solutions. n

STEPHEN MILES | ON RECORD n

There are a lot of wannabes who claim to do infrastructure management. But, as far as core capabilities are concerned, there is

no one even close to us, be it next generation analytics or in the modules.

$3bn Estimated

size of the IT infrastructure

market by 2016. S O U R C E : G A R T N E R


n COVER STORY



TECHNOLOGY is changing rapidly, coercing vendors—large and small—to be innovative and stay relevant to changing customer demands. The big and popular com-panies with their well entrenched R&D manage to stay

ahead of the tech curve by re-engineering their legacy solutions. At the same time, hordes of start-ups, sprouting daily, aim to compete and usurp these tech giants.

The budget constraints following the recession in 2008 gave a thrust to new delivery models like SaaS, cloud, mobility and other rising technologies. This technology landscape has inspired up-and-coming entrepreneurs to venture into, and create more enter-prise solutions than ever before.

The global market, including the US, Europe and India, is churn-ing out new vendors, many of which are headed by people of Indian origin. These young companies might lack mammoth marketing budgets and extensive channel enablement programs, but they are up and ready for a fight to the finish.

Enterprise solution providers continuously attempt to be a value add and trusted advisor to customers. And these young companies need the right set of competent channel partners—systems integrators, VARs, ISVs, resellers—to help them spread across geographies.

So, are new vendors on your radar? How do you identify new vendors to partner with? Here is a selection of 50 companies, in no particular order, who hope to challenge the existing status quo.

Many product firms have made it big. Few others are hot on their heels with a long-term vision and extreme innovation. Are these 50 promising companies on the radar of enterprise partners? By Team ChannelWorld

COVER STORY n

Gramener’s offerings around data visualization is now being recognized by the industry, and embraced by partners.

Gramener

Key Technologies: Data analytics and visualization Top Executives: J. Ramachandran (CEO), Naveen Gattu (COO)FOUNDED in 2010, Hyderabad-headquartered Gramener services 14 clients across verticals like telecom, BFSI, retail, contract farming, healthcare, media, manufacturing, education and public sector.

Gramener’s visualization offering can transform data

into actionable business information dashboards that make it visually obvious to all. Its visual intelligence is a cutting-edge technology that presents a pictorial view of information that provides a simple understanding of diverse, heterogeneous, and big data.

Gramener is the only automated analysis, scalable visualization offering with an ability to

process arbitrarily large data on multiple servers.

“Gramener would like to be seen as an enabler for businesses and nations to consume data, in a manner that helps them achieve their goals and objectives through data driven leader-ship,” says J.Ramachandran, CEO of Gramener.

It has signed up part-ners in Singapore, Middle East, and India.

MIDOKURATechnology: SDNKey Executives: Tatsuya Kato, CEO; Dan Mihai Dumitriu, CTO MIDOKURA is a network virtualization vendor based in Japan. It caters to the needs of enterprises by reducing dependence on physical networks, and lowering the costs of management. So far the company has pulled in $6 million (about Rs 32 crore) from investors around Japan and is go-ing steady with its SDN strategy. MidoNet is a popular product from the Midokura stable which pro-vides a platform where vir-tual switches and network-based architecture can be created without altering the physical network.

INSIGHT SQUAREDKey Technologies:Business Intelligence Website: www.insightsquared.comINSIGHTSQUAREDdevelops very specific BI tools for SMBs, namely revenue analytics software. The company claims that it is the number one revenue analytics tool for Salesforce.com. Its product is built from the ground up for sales managers and business executives who run small and mid-sized companies. Its SaaS product lives in the cloud, which means SMBs don’t need to license expensive software, invest in new hardware, or employ dedicated IT and analytics staff to use it.

LocalyticsKey Technologies: Enterprise app analyticsHeadquarters: Boston, USALOCALYTICS, conceived in 2008 by consultant, Raj Aggarwal, (CEO) and Microsoft engineers, Henry Cipolla (CTO) and Andrew Rollins (Chief Software Architect), has gone from concept, to beta, to one of the most widely used enterprise app analytics and marketing tools in the US today. Localytics is where it is because founder-visionaries recognized that apps would

revolutionize the way organizations market and sell to their users. This paradigm shift would need a whole new approach of analyzing and aggregating data.

With a client roster including Microsoft, eBay, The New York Times and News Corporation. Localytics continues to push the envelope to help the world’s leading brands and app publishers form fundamentally more successful user relationships.

n COVER STORY

From left to right: B. Ganes Kesari, VP, Products and Delivery; J. Ramachnadran, CEO; Naveen Gattu, C0O.

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Key Technologies: Security, virtualization Founded: 2011THE enterprise IT com-munity should sit-up and take notice of this new-age vendor based out of Cupertino, California. Founded by Gaurav Ban-ga, Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt in 2011—amid a lot of speculation—Bromium

BromiumIts virtualization technology is transforming IT and making systems more manageable.

launched its software prod-uct vSentry based on the Bromium Microvisor (a hy-pervisor centred on Secu-rity) in November, 2012.

Their software can virtu-ally end the era of malware, by isolating the threats to end-point security of the enterprise architecture. Bromium’s vSentry termi-nates any potential threat in

the form of malware with-out the need of any premi-um updates or patches over a period of time.

Earlier Bromium, in a Se-ries B funding, raised $26.5 million (about Rs 143 crore) which was led by Highland Capital Partners. So far, it has managed to raise around $37 million (about Rs 197 crore) in total. In an age of constant security glitches and fear of enterprise data getting compromised, this competitively priced secu-rity platform is expected to stand out in the solution provider community, and should give competing ven-dors a run for their money.

FINAHUBKey Technologies: SaaS-based CRMKey Executive: Ajit K.George, CEO; Rajesh Sukumaran, Co-FounderFINAHUB is one of the most promising start ups based in Kochi. The company has already been awarded by Startup Village as one of the Top Ten Start Ups to watch out for in 2013. Founded by Rajesh.S and Ajith K. George,


Finahub has launched its SaaS-based CRM platforms for retail brokerage companies in India.

Products like Kinship Platform provide a platform wherein customer engagement can be improved which is proving to be helpful to enterprises and SMBs. Finahub, so far, has not received any funding from any venture capital firms. It functions solely on the funding of its founders.

DRUVA SOFTWARE Key Technologies: Endpoint backup, secure file sharing, data loss prevention, real-time analyticsCEO: Jaspreet SinghDRUVA has diversified their offerings beyond the tradi-tional data deduplication and DLP solutions with their entry into enterprise collabo-ration and secure file share. Druva is essentially what Dropbox is providing con-sumers, but at an enterprise level. It has a more than 1,450 customers across 42 coun-tries. They have also recently signed a $1 million (about Rs 5 crore) deal with UC Berke-ley to protect data across 20,000 endpoints and with NASA for 5000 endpoints. Druva has been consistently growing at about 350 percent for the last three years.

ANAXEE TECHNOLOGIES Key Technologies: Biometrics-based identity management and attendance solutionsHeadquarters: Indore ANAXEE develops biometrics solutions for the UIDAI project. It’s among the few companies short-listed for authentication proof of concept studies conducted by UIDAI. It has various strategic and technology partnerships in this area. It also offers biometrics-based software solutions on a SaaS model. It focuses on products around attendance, access control, surveillance, and fingerprint scanners. Anaxee also offers end-to-end solutions to customers that include hardware, software and integration, and is a NirmaLabs incubated company.

Ian Pratt (L), Co–Founder and SVP, Products, and Simon Crosby, Co-Founder and CTO.

Key Technologies: Networking, storageFounded: Westborough, USASET up in late 2009, Sim-pliVity is one of the few ven-dors that provide a range of solutions in the convergence domain. It was founded by Doron Kempel. The vendor has come out with various products which simplify IT infrastructure needs.

With state-of-the-art facil-ity and a world class team at Kempel’s disposal, the net-working vendor has come up with interesting products like OmniCube which puts together networking, stor-age and server, and other IT management software in a single-box enclosure.

SimpliVityThis vendor claims to pro-vide solutions in unified communications, WAN optimization, integration of cloud platforms, data deduplication at half the operating costs quoted by traditional IT vendors.

Innovative solutions and products from vendors like SimpliVity is an aspect that price-sensitive enter-prise IT markets like India look out for. Its niche solu-tions also provide opportu-nities for channel partners to better address customer needs. It is backed by in-vestments from Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Accel Partners, and Charles River Ventures.

This new-age vendor intends to reduce cost and simplify the IT environment.

CIPHERGRAPH NETWORKSKey Technologies: Managed cloud security gatewayFocus Verticals: IT/ITES, financeUS-based CipherGraph Networks was founded in 2011 by Jitender Sharan. Its key product, cloud security gateway, claims to have an upper-hand over competi-tion in terms of mobility and access control. The SaaS model and high scalability make it a viable option for enterprise customers. The company has a well-etched partner roadmap for system integrators, solution archi-tects and cloud consultants. Their future plans include rapid expansion on AWS and Azure in the US and India. It’s India office is lo-cated in Bangalore.

PLEXXI Key Technologies: SDN Products: Plexxi Control and Plexxi SwitchPLEXXI Control is a server-based software that computes con-nectivity to support workload needs. Plexxi Switch provides low-latency 10G and 40G Ethernet access connec-tions, which intercon-nects with each other. Plexxi has raised over $48 million (about Rs 257 crore) in funding. Plexxi calls its strategy Affinity Networking, wherein physical and virtual servers, storage and networking devices need to be connected to each other as directly as possible, and groups of these devices work together as part of an application workload exhibiting ‘affinity’ to

WHIPTAILKey Technologies: Storage arraysHeadquarters: New Jersey, USAWHIPTAIL is a storage company founded by consultant James Candelaria that revels in being a world leader in flash-based NAND silicon storage technology. WHIPTAIL’s silicon storage arrays (ACCELA and INVICTA) and solutions claim to offer unsurpassed speed and response times, making it a viable name for verticals like education, government, e-commerce, healthcare, etcetera, which have to deal with humongous amounts of data. The company works with strategic OEM partners such as Cisco, VMware and SanDisk.

ENTRIB TECHNOLOGIESKey Technologies: Mobile workforce productivity solutions on the cloud Focus Verticals: Utility (piped gas), manufacturing, FMCG and retailENTRIB Technologies, headed by Kiran Nataraj (CEO) and Atul Dambalkar (CTO), offers solutions built around its enterprise mobile gateway which is a mobile App PaaS covering cloud computing and mobile technologies for smartphone and tablets.

The company is aligning with IT service providers, systems integrators and ISVs to tap the BFSI space.

They will roll out mobile workforce productivity solutions for the SME sector on a pay-as-you-go model across BFSI, utility, FMCG and retail.


From left to right: Doron Kempel, Chairman and CEO, Jesse St. Laurent, Director, Product Strategy; Rich Shea, VP, Sales; Tom Grave, VP, Marketing.

Key Technologies: Platform that unifies social computing, PaaS and big data.Focus Verticals: BFSI, healthcareBANGALORE-based i-nable Solutions was founded by Sumeet Anand in 2007. This 10-employee company registered a 25 percent revenue growth in FY 2011-12 compared to the previous one.

Its Kreeo platform en-ables the creation of new generation apps. These apps can manage struc-tured and unstructured data in a unified way. The Kreeo Enterprise V4.0 product is a collective intelligence solution that simplifies the management of knowledge and social collaboration in an enter-prise, and enables intel-

ligent information discov-ery. The product claims to resolve issues many of the competing products are unable to accomplish.

It allows object level ac-cess control, making each content co-editable (like wiki) or author editable(like a blog), publishing the same content into multiple spac-es, co-editing in draft mode, filtering of content based on context, and managing structured and unstruc-tured content together.

Kreeo offerings are sold through VARs, system inte-grators and service provid-ers to enterprise users. The launch of its SaaS offering is scheduled for April 2013. i-nable is also focusing on add-on apps ecosystem development and increased overseas sales efforts.

i-nable SolutionsThe company’s Kreeo platform enables the creation of new generation apps.

AKIBAN TECHNOLOGIESKey Technologies: Data virtualizationFounders: David McFarlane, CEO, Ori Herrnstadt, CTOAKIBAN Technologies is a DB development, solu-tions and services compa-ny that works to build its Akiban platform. It strives to create an architecture that developers and DBAs love to use. With strong patents and technology alliances with the likes of Amazon Web Services, this company has solu-tions such as Akiban En-terprise that it claims can enable companies to meet their mobile, big data and real-time reporting demands on operational systems. The company’s diverse partner ecosystem makes it an interesting player to watch out for.

VMC TECHNOLOGIESKey Technologies: Cloud-based CRMHeadquarters: Bangalore-based VMC TECHNOLOGIES provides a whole gamut of cloud-based solutions. The vendor says that its solutions improves the business processes of end-customers and provides better ROI from sales activities. It has a range of cost efficient products like the MCube and Sales Track which help in the optimization of sales process, leading to better margins. Enterprise customers should watch out for VMC as it provides secure and scalable solutions at minimal costs.

HIGH CLOUD SECURITYKey Technologies: Cloud Security Headquarters: California, USAHIGHCLOUD Security, a software company founded by Silicon Valley veterans, builds encryption and key management software that helps organizations securely transition to a virtualized datacenter or to the cloud through its HighCloud solution. The company claims to have customers and analysts rooting for its solution in a big way. With a clientele in big industries such as healthcare, and tie-ups with OEMs and cloud ser-vice providers, High Cloud Security is all set to make giant strides.

PORTICORKey Technologies: Cloud security Headquarters: Ramat Hasharon (Israel)PORTICOR’S virtual private data system reportedly combines state-of-the-art encryption with patented key management to protect critical data in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Founded by Gilad Parann-Nissany and Yaron Sheffer, this Israel-based company says that it is committed to protecting private information stored in public clouds. The company is an official solution provider for Amazon AWS, and was the only cloud security semi-finalist at the AWS 2011 start up challenge. Porticor also partners with VMware, HP, IBM and Red Hat, among others.

COVER STORY n

From left to right: Biswajit Das, Lead, R&D; Sumeet Anand, CEO; Karthick Kumar. R, Engineer , Web Apps; Sandipon Banik, GM – HR, Admin, and Finance; Sravani. T, Engineer, Web Apps.

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Key Technologies: Cloud security (Encryption gateway)Founder and CEO: Pravin Kothari CIPHERCLOUD is commit-ted to building trust in the cloud. Its cloud encryption gateway technology is se-curing organizations world-wide. The company was founded by Pravin Kothari,

who recognized the op-portunity to protect sensi-tive enterprise data across multiple clouds through a revolutionary new ap-proach—the cloud encryp-tion gateway. Previously, Kothari was a co-founder of ArcSight, a security soft-ware company, which was

acquired by HP for $1.6 billion ( about Rs 8,500 crore) .

CipherCloud has recent-ly attracted a $30 million (about Rs 160 crore) invest-ment from premier venture capital firms including An-dreessen Horowitz (Face-book, Twitter, Groupon, Skype, and Zynga), Index Ventures, and T-Venture (VC investment arm of Deutsche Telekom).

CipherCloud has experi-enced exceptional growth and success, and already has over 150 employees and marquee customers in the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. The company’s innovation in format and operation-preserving encryption, and tokeniza-tion technology have been recognized by industry thought leaders with over a dozen awards, includ-ing Gartner’s Cool Vendor in Cloud Security. The company has delivered products for major cloud services such as Salesforce, Google Apps, Amazon Cloud, and Office 365.

CipherCloud claims a success of over 1.2 million live users, over 100 million customer records pro-tected, across 10 industries spread over eight countries.

CipherCloudIt’s cloud encryption gateway technology can do away with security and compliance hassles.

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Vigyanlabs InnovationsKey Technologies: Energy management solution for IT infrastructure Founders: Srinivas Varadarajan and Srivatsa Krishnaswamy VIGYANLABS Innovations was founded in 2009. It’s intelligent power and performance management platform works by sensing the power needs of various applications, and optimizes power consumption without interfering with user experience or system performance. US-patented software, IPMPlus enables green IT that facilitates 30 percent power savings for IT Infrastructure.

IPMPlus enterprise edition accommodates thousands of desktops, servers, UPS, and provides centralized management of power policies across Windows desktops, servers and multiple Linux variants.

Its focus verticals include educational, BFSI, IT, ITES and telecom.

In the future, Vigyanlabs will include support for non-x86 platform, storage arrays, and other equipments in datacenters and networking equipment. The company works with system integrators in Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai.

CAPILLARY TECHNOLOGIESKey Technologies: Cloud computing, CRMKey Executives: Aneesh Reddy, CEO; Krishna Mehra, VP-Products and Services CAPILLARY Technologies is a cloud-based provider of social and mobile CRM so-lutions. Its end-to-end cus-tomer-centric solutions have helped many international brands engage with clients more efficiently. Its custom-ers include top brands like Nike, United Colors of Ben-etton, and Puma among oth-ers. Capillary has spread its wings around the globe with offices in London, Dubai, Bangalore and Beijing under the astute guardianship of experienced industry profes-sionals. It was also awarded the Red Herring Asia Top 100 Companies of 2012.

OKTAKey Technologies: On-demand identity and access managementKey Executives: Todd McKinnon, CEO; Kara Wilson, CMOBACKED by major venture capitalist firms like Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz , Okta is a San Francisco-based provider of enterprise level identity and access management solutions based in the cloud. The team at Okta has developed state-of-the-art on-premise identity management solutions suitable for employees, customers, as well as partners. Their customers include LinkedIn, National Geographic, BMC Software, Groupon and SAP.

From left to right: Varun Badhwar, VP, Product Strategy and Solution Engineering; Dev Ghoshal, SVP, Strategy, Global Alliances, and Customer Success; Pravin Kothari, CEO; Travis Patterson, SVP, Worldwide Sales; Paige Leidig, SVP & CMO.

Ozonetel SystemsKey Technologies: Cloud telephony services over PSTN cloudRevenues FY 2011-12: Rs. 2.5 croreBASED in Hyderabad, Ozonetel was founded in 2007 by Murthy Chintalapati. It has a pan-India presence including tier-1 locations like Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai. KooKoo, its cloud telephony platform allows businesses and entrepreneurs

to build voice applications using any web technology.Ozonetel has built a PSTN cloud by installing its servers in top 12 cities across India. CloudAgent allows SMBs to have a professional contact center to service their clients without having to invest in capex. It’s a plug and play system with zero hardware/software installation which provides complete management

of the calls being handled by the employees/call center agents. It enables domestic call centers to move to tier 2 and tier 3 cities, and save almost 80 percent cost. The company works with ISVs VARs, SIs, CRM vendors and call centers in major Indian cities. There are more than 50 apps that have been developed on their platform by third party businesses, and the plan is to create a market to use them to service their clients.

GlobalOutlookIt offers an entire suite of email messaging, collaboration and communication tools on the cloud.Key Technologies: Cloud-based UC and collaboration solutionsFounded: 2007 GLOBALOUTLOOK isa portfolio company of Naya Ventures, an early- stage venture capital firm that invests in mobile, cloud and big data start ups in the US and India. It has partnerships with

Microsoft, BlackBerry and McAfee to offer solutions to enterprises and SMEs. The solutions come pre-built with security, and offer a single interface experience to customers. It has both direct and indirect go-to-market models. Its partner ecosystem includes telcos, ISPs, MSPs, ISVs and Web hosting companies. It also

offers partners the option to white-label the offer-ings, wherein customers never see the GlobalOutlook brand. The partner owns the customer and can build their own brand, including branded contracts, portals and themes. GlobalOutlook has a range of customers across the globe, and has offices in Dallas, Texas, and Hyderabad. As a complete office cloud communication services provider, the Globa-lOutlook team is constantly innovating to provide its customers the best-of-breed technologies in the unified cloud-based communication and collaboration domain.

KONY SOLUTIONSKey Technologies: Mobile appli-cation developmentKey Executives: Raj Koneru, CEO; David Schreffler, SVP-SalesKONY Solutions provides platforms for enterprise mo-bile applications. It boasts of customers like Capital One, Toyota, Hyatt, and a number of Fortune 500 com-panies. It has a dedicated team of professionals with mobile expertise that can help end-customers initiate enterprise mobile solutions regardless of the platform. Kony provides niche mobile application management (MAM) solutions in partnership with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and IBM among others.

ASTEORKey Technologies: Microsoft .NET, SQLServer, Amazon, Microsoft Azure Revenues FY 2011-12:Rs 4.7 crore HEADQUARTERED in the historical town of Thanjavur, the company was founded by Shankar Krishnamoorthy (CEO), Gowri Subramanian (Chairman) and Bhoo Thirumalai (Director)in 2009.

Techcello is a cloud-ready multi-tenant application development platform used by ISVs and innovative enterprises to build or migrate their product better and faster to .NET. It delivers 30 to 50 percent savings in cost and time, apart from the strategic and technical control over the entire application stack for enterprise customers.

BPO, retail, HR, and healthcare are their main verticals in India.

Raghu Kumar (L), Chief Executive Officer, and D.N. Sendhil Kumar, Head, Channel and Sales.


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Key Technologies: Software for BFSI, BPM and BI Headquarters (India): Mumbai AGILE was formed by acquiring and merging strategic software product technology companies providing software solu-tions, technology services, BPO and KPO. The com-pany has offices in UAE, Singapore, and India and extends its reach through partners in Latin America,

Agile Financial TechnologiesAgile FT provides software and services to the insurance, banking and financial services sectors.

the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. Its strategic in-tent is to target enterprises in the BFSI sector. Some of its key offerings include investment management, lending management, mi-crofinance and insurance. Apart from such application software, it also offers con-sulting, managed services and outsourcing services for banks, investment/asset management companies,

insurance firms and other financial institutions. It also offers BPM and BI tools. The company recently completed its $ 5.7million (about Rs 30 crore) Series A financing, led by IDG Ventures India. According to Kalpesh Desai, founder and CEO of Agile Financial Technologies, there are nearly 5,000 BFSI institutions across its target markets and this represents a multi-billion dollar opportu-nity with double-digit annual growth. The Agile FT team is well on its way to fulfill its vision of becoming a market leader in the BFSI software product space.

NIQOTINKey Technologies: Cloud ERP application for MSMEs.Focus Verticals: Manufacturing and retailNIQOTIN aims to target 10,000 MSME customers with a revenue base of Rs 10 crore in the next three years . “Our endeavor is to be a technology enabler for the MSME ecosystem,” says Surjith Singh, founder of Niqotin.

Rural ERP is the first Indian language cloud ERP for the MSME sector which is available

in nine Indian languages and offers lowest TCO, anytime, anywhere access from mobiles, tablets and PCs, with a pay-as-you-go, build-as-you-grow model.

Niqotin works with cloud application resellers through its pan-India presence. The company’s main objective is to help MSMEs to control their cost and competitiveness, and allow them to rise at par with their technologically-advanced counterparts, both locally and globally.

CIRCONUSKey Technologies: Performance monitoring as a serviceHeadquarters: Columbia, USATHIS start up provides SaaS system for monitor-ing, trending, visualization, fault-detection/alerting, and reporting. The company has products designed for SMBs, large enterprises and large infrastructure providers. Circonus works with cloud/hosting provid-ers, systems integrators, consultants and other third-parties. It was architected from the start to handle both physical and virtual infrastructure. The compa-ny has customers in various verticals including advertis-ing, airlines, education, and insurance, among others. Circonus was named ‘Cool vendor’ by Gartner in 2012.

VARMOURKey Technologies:Software-defined security Founded: 2011 THIS Silicon Valley start up is taking virtualization into the realm of network security, pioneering a new kind of solution called software-defined security (SDSec). SDSec separates the security control plane from the enforcement (data) plane, much as SDNs abstract the network control plane from the forwarding plane. This is quite different from virtual firewalls, which are controlled and managed via static rules like conventional firewalls. The vArmour platform can be deployed in SDN environments and in conventional IP networks.

Shefali Khera (L), Chief Marketing Officer, and Kalpesh Desai, Chief Executive Officer.


HOW BOLD

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n COVER STORY

The company uses M2M technology to expand and improve business across verticals.

ConnectM Key Technologies: M2M-based business intelligence Headquarters: Bangalore CONNECTM provides end-to-end solutions, consulting, application development and business intelligence to verticals like transportation, utili-ties and enterprise. These offerings are enabled by applications powered with Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication technology. ConnectM also works with players across

the M2M value chain and provides consulting, appli-cation development, prod-uct lifecycle development and sustenance services. Its offerings include M2M platform, M2M apps, ser-vices, and data analytics. Services provide a robust and scalable framework for organizations to develop customized end user appli-cations in quick time. The application provides all the basic building blocks of a Web application along with

flexibility to build on-line reports and dashboards to suit business needs. The extended business intelli-gence service framework allows developers to pro-vide advanced analytical capability to process huge amounts of informa-tion and create action-able intelligence. The company believes that a fragmented market struc-ture in its wide range of target markets is driving demand for turnkey solu-tion capabilities, applica-tion, and technology and communication exper-tise. ConnectM is well positioned to address this opportunity, chasing an addressable market pro-jected to be around $1.5 billion (about Rs 8,000 crore) by 2014.

Attinad SoftwareKey Technologies: Mobility, cloud, data analytics Founder: Mohammed RijasTRIVANDRUM-based Attinad was conceived by a group of ex-Infosys employees. The company’s mobility middleware extends across enterprise applications onto any mobile platform in a secure manner.

With a strong mobility product and services portfolio, Attinad works with Fortune 500 clients globally to help them roll out mobility solutions. The key products is SAP’s mobility product (to extend any SAP module to different mobile platforms), mobile tender management application (end-to-end tender management

software with back-end and front-end running on an iPad), mobile patient management system, and service management system.

Manufacturing and pharmaceutical are its focus verticals in India. It was declared the official mobility partner of a major telecom service provider.

EMBRANEKey Technologies: SDN Founded: 2009 BASED in Silicon Valley, Embrane delivers on-demand software-defined network solutions and ser-vices. Founded by a group of former Cisco executives, the company’s flagship product is Heleos, a distributed soft-ware platform for virtual-izing Layer 4-7 services like load balancing, firewalling, VPNs, etcetera. It allows cloud service providers and enterprises to create cloud infrastructure-as-a-service models for their customers. It supports keyless licens-ing in which customers only pay for what they sell or use based on usage, or on an an-nual subscription.

ARRAY SHIELD TECHNOLOGIESKey Technologies: Two factor authentication, enterprise and cloud application access Focus Verticals: BFSI, logistics, manufacturing, IT/ITESARRAY Shield was founded by Pavan Thatha. It provides security against advanced hacking attacks like real-time replay attacks that compromise traditional token and SMS-based authentication solutions. Its product, IDAS, provides a 2FA solution that leverages visual patterns that a user can remember, and a card that can be carried by the user.

It has GTM partnerships in India, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Netherlands, the Middle East and Africa, and will launch a strong product pipeline complementary to its core 2FA offering.

Sriram Chidambaram (L), Chief Executive Officer , and Girish Subramanya, Chief Operating Officer.

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HOW BOLDBOLD means beating the oddsPerformance is the ultimate leveler—both in life and in business. ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have overcome obstacles and made it to the top. If you have successfully grown your business despite tough conditions, we are looking for you!


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It offers business applications on a SaaS model with its standard and premium plans.

Apptivo

Key Technologies: CRM, SCM, HRM CEO: Bastin GeraldAPPTIVO offers various business applications like CRM, project management, HRM, supply chain, and in-voicing tools on a SaaS mod-el to small and mid-sized customers. Apptivo’s stan-dard plan comes free. Appti-vo hosts a collection of free Web-based applications.

Business users then start by adding more free apps and eventually upgrade to a paid plan as their busi-ness grows. It also offers Google Apps integration and free mobile invoic-ing to its customers. The standard plan has no limits on the number of users, amount of data and the du-ration you can be on it. The premium plan, which is the

paid version, includes richer features that allow users to interact with customers, vendors, and other businesses. It also has the ability to setup a WordPress-based busi-ness Website and an online store quickly. The company is now on the look out for partners and will be refining its part-ner program shortly.

CLOUDPASSAGE Key Technologies: Cloud security Headquarters: San FranciscoTHE company’s Halo plat-form is a SaaS-based secu-rity platform that operates seamlessly across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments and can even be used on physical serv-ers. Halo unifies multiple important security capabili-ties into a single centrally-managed solution. It offers a range of features from dy-namic firewall automation to software vulnerability assessment, event logging and alerting, account man-agement and more. Halo requires no hardware, com-plex deployment or special expertise. CloudPassage is backed by Benchmark Capital, Tenaya Capital and other investors.

4 SPIRESKey Technologies: Collaboration tools Founded: 20104 SPIRES’ social network solution, Commit Keeper, is an on-demand, Web-based work management and tracking system where business people can connect, converse, collaborate and commit to taking action together. Analysts, reviewers and customers are currently rating the work management flow capabilities of this 4Spires product quite highly. The company has strong technology partnerships with software development companies such as Altone Services, Baroo Software, IOTAP, LodeCoen.com, to name a few, for design and user interface support.

GridstoreTechnologies: Storage Key Executives: Geoff Barrall, Chairman; Kelly Murphy, CEO GRIDSTORE is a California-based vendor that offers storage solutions on the cloud. Grid, one of their products, allows organizations to increase their storage capacity by adding building blocks of storage on top of each other as requirements grow. Its products and solutions provide scalable storage for the SMB segment in a virtualized environment.

So far, the company has raised around $15 million (about Rs 80 crore) in the form of venture capital funding through GGV Capital and Onset ventures. As a completely channel-driven company, Gridstore has a well directed accelerate partner programme for their networked partners around the globe. With various interesting and innovative solutions, Gridstore promises to reduce storage complications.

n COVER STORY

From left to right: Bastin Gerald, Founder and CEO; Todd Miner, Product Manager; Kumar Devarakonda, VP, India Development Center.

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AARON RALSTON severed his arm to free himself from a boulder that had pinned him down for five days and eight hours during a hiking accident, and lived to tell the tale.

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Key Technologies: Social media collaborationHeadquarters: Washington, USAMANGOSPRING is a social intranet provider which was founded in 2008 by Anup Kejriwal. Before launching MangoSpring, Kejriwal successfully founded ThumbSpeed in 2004, which was acquired by OZ (now part of Nokia) in 2007.

MangoSpringIt hopes to hit pay dirt with MangoApps, its enterprise social media collaboration platform.

MangoApps—Man-goSpring’s flagship enter-prise social collaboration platform—is a combination of traditional intranet, social networking, and team col-laboration. It is designed for small, medium and large enterprises. MangoApps comes pre-integrated with different features, some of which include microblog-ging, document manage-ment, instant messenger,

and project management, and gives users the option of disabling/enabling features based on requirement.

The vendor believes that social collaboration will see increased adoption in the near future in the country. MangoSpring is planning to align with resellers who focus on selling enterprise systems like Sharepoint and Google Docs, and also CRM solutions like Dynamics, Salesforce and SugarCRM. It also has plans in place to sign up selected software distributors to further reach out to more resellers and expand its geographic reach. MangoApps is avail-able in both on-premise and cloud models.

APPTHORITYKey Technologies: Mobile device managementHeadquarters: California, USAAPPTHORITY’S assisting enterprises and SMEs deal with the perils of BYOD and consumerization of IT through its mobile device management and enterprise mobility management solutions. The mobile security vendor founded in 2011 has been amongst the awards. It has been awarded the Most Innovative Company at the RSA Conference in 2012 and also been included in the SNIT 16

Innovator (Security Innovation Network). The company uses its technology to analyse the malware risks involved in mobile apps used in enterprises. The vendor has an elaborate partner ecosystem in place through which Appthority applications can be bought. As a complete enterprise mobile device management provider, the Appthority team has increased in size, and is constantly innovating to provide best-of-breed technologies in the enterprise mobility domain.


VERACODEKey Technologies: Application security testing Headquarters: Massachusetts, USAVERACODE’S patented and cloud-based application risk management capabilities allow customers to govern and mitigate software se-curity risk across a single application or an enterprise portfolio with unmatched simplicity. The company says its vision is to make it simple and cost-effective for organizations to accurately identify and manage appli-cation security risk.

Veracode allows partners to leverage its solution to provide automated static and dynamic analysis. Their security expertise and ser-vices can help customers understand the security of their applications and re-duce risk.

CONTEXTREAMKey Technologies: SDNHeadquarters: California, USACONTEXTREAM is a privately held software company delivering cloud-based network virtualization framework for carriers, cloud service providers, and private cloud operators. Leveraging the power of proven virtualization and grid technologies, ConteXtream says its market-ready products help extract more value and profitability from networks. ConteXtream is backed by leading Silicon Valley and global investors including Benhamou Global Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, Norwest Venture Partners and Sofinnova Ventures as well as Comcast Interactive Capital and Verizon Investments.

Back row: Ashish Agarwal, VP-Product Management; Vishwa Malhotra, Co-Founder and CTO; Kiran .P, Manager-Mobile Software Engineering. Front: Isha Kakodkar, Manager-Software Development, and Anjali Ghadge, VP-HR.

HOW BOLDBOLD means taking risksWith great risks come great rewards, be it personal or business risks. ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have bet big when they believed in what they were doing. If you have taken calculated risks in your business that paid off, we are looking for you!


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Key Technologies: UTM Founded: 2010NEVALES Networks, an Indian UTM company, of-fers emerging businesses a secure environment to conduct their business. The Nevales gateway device integrates several crucial security features in a single management plat-form. The Nevales plat-form is reportedly a com-bination of on-premise and cloud services, making it

Nevales NetworksUTM’s new-kid-on-the-block has everything going its way, from awards to VC funding.

a hot proposition for part-ners and customers alike. Currently, the company has customers from across verti-cals like education, financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, automo-bile dealerships, hospital-ity, engineering, and IT/IT enabled services to name a few. The company also has a partner program, the Nevales Partner Program, to support interested partners working in the SME space.

This is because of the huge growth curve seen in the smaller organizations.

Nevales Networks was founded by Kaushik Thak-kar, a seasoned serial en-trepreneur and technology leader, Ravishankar an experienced banker and Sunija Rishi a marketing specialist. Nevales com-pleted its angel round in March 2010 and in January 2011, raised funding from Seedfund, one of India’s leading early stage invest-ment firms.

Nevales was also fea-tured as Techcircle’s Top 10 emerging Indian SaaS com-panies to watch out for in 2012 and Nasscom Emerge 50 company for 2011.

ACTIFIOKey Technologies: Virtualization, big data Founded: 2009ACTIFIO is a Gartner 2012 Cool Vendor winner. It claims to have the first storage system in the industry which conveniently manages big data. Actifio has assisted IT organizations of all sizes to cope with issues of vendor lock-in associated with the proliferation of big data. The solutions are based on Actifio’s VirtualData Pipeline

technology which reduces the costs of management of data by up to 90 percent. The company already has a number of customers across the world. It has offices in Germany, Netherlands, Australia, Israel and a development center in India. This data management virtualization vendor has even put across a dedicated channel partner program, which it believes will help partners deliver their copy data management to the end customers.


iCREATEKey Technologies: Business IntelligenceHeadquarters: BangaloreiCREATE is a business intelligence vendor based out of Bangalore that offers products and solutions for the BFSI sector. Their range of core banking products such as BizStart, BizScore and BizManage smoothly works with a bank’s infra-structure. These products present banks with specific insights on core banking data that assists in business growth. iCreate also has strategic partnerships with Red Hat, Actian Corpora-tion and Informatica, and has raised about Rs 50 crore from Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital.

EMBOTICSKey Technologies: Virtualization and private cloud management software Founder: Jay Litkey, President and CEOCANADA-based Embotics’ V-Commander is a software solution that provides management, automation and self-service provisioning for IT managers and administrators in mid-sized enterprises who are building or managing private cloud infrastructures. The company has a comprehensive set of virtualization and private cloud management capabilities in a single, integrated software package.

Embotics was in the news recently when it announced a smart upgrade program for users of VMware vCenter Lab Manager, which will reach its end of life this year and will no longer be supported by VMware.

Ravishankar (L), Co-Founder and CEO, and Kaushik Thakkar, Co-Founder and Head Corporate Development.

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BENOÎT LECOMTE was the first person to swim across the Atlantic Ocean without a kick board.

BOLD means being the firstLeaders don’t hesitate to do the unprecedented—in life or in business. ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have dared to swim in uncharted waters. If you have been the frontrunner in your business, we are looking for you!


Its ‘work visibility’ automated solution monitors and enhances enterprise productivity.

Sapience Analytics

Key Technologies: Enterprise class automated time/effort analytics.Key Verticals: IT/ITES, engineering services, back offices at BFSI.SAPIENCE’S AutomatedEnterprise Effort is a client server architecture which scales to more than 50,000 users and is available on-premise or on SaaS.

There are several low-level employee monitoring tools that provide a flood of data about what each employee is doing within an enterprise, however

those are not exactly suited for an enterprise according to the company. As a first mover in this space, Sapience has thus created a new market as its product, available globally, delivers enterprise class automated time/effort analytics.

The product delivers 15 to 20 percent gains in work output for companies. This is achieved through automated work visibility, and delivers Rs 1 crore as value each year per 100 employees.

This Pune-based company has adopted a multi-dimensional “expanding web” growth strategy. The product is expanding beyond Windows to cover all platforms including Mac, Linux, tablets and smartphones.

Sapience is aligning itself across the partner community that includes VARs, SIs, OEMs, and ISVs. According to the company, further growth will be through partner alliances, reseller networks, and system integrators. This year will see Sapience venturing outside India.

DelphixKey Technologies: Database virtualizationFounded: 2008DELPHIX helps reduce intricacies in the management of an enterprise’s database, and increases productivity of organizations by simply virtualizing the database and reducing the amount of

space and costs involved. It products have delivered better ROI to SMEs and large enterprises alike. Delphix has at its disposal a team of skilled professionals who have created products such as Oracle RAC which has helped the company garner good revenues in the last couple of years. Many of Delphix’s

customers are Fortune 1000 companies that work across verticals like telecom, retail, manufacturing, etcetera. The number of Delphix’s wins can be credited to its valued partner ecosystem which has been established around the world. The company also has technology partnerships with Oracle and VMware.

NUTANIXKey Technologies: VirtualizationHeadquarters: San Jose, USANUTANIX’S SAN-less vir-tualized datacenter platform converges two tiers of infra-structure to one. The com-pany’s innovative distributed storage and compute cluster localizes the datapath for higher performance and re-duced complexity.

Inspired by SAN-less distributed systems employed by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, Nutanix has an enterprise-friendly, easy to deploy storage and com-pute cluster. The company enjoys a clientele across all key verticals includes education, government, accounting, legal, retail, healthcare, science, trans-portation, and manufactur-ing, to name a few.

NAKIVO Key Technologies: Backup and replication Headquarters: California , USANAKIVO’S VM backup and replication solution is meant for VMware virtualized environments with Microsoft and Oracle applications. It works across SANs, LANs and WANs to help businesses protect their VMware-based data, applications, and business services. Designed specifically for SMBs, their products are sold primarily through partners. It addresses the challenges of VM backup, replication, and recovery for datacenter and cloud. It’s also used for protecting VMs with live applications, groups of VMs supporting a cloud service, and transaction-intensive virtualized set of workloads.

From left to right: Avinash Sethi, CMO; Ranjit Nambiar, VP, Sales; Hemant Joshi, Co-Founder ; Madhukar Bhatia, Co-Founder and Director; Swati Deodhar, Co-Founder; Shirish Deodhar, Co-Founder and CEO.

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HOW BOLDBOLD means exploring new boundariesNo place is ‘out of bounds’ for travel, or business. ChannelWorld Premier 100 Awards will recognize IT channel partners who have stretched the boundaries of conventional thinking and taken their business places. If you have successfully expanded the reach or scope of your business, then we are looking for you!


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NEIL ARMSTRONG, the first man on the moon, gave new meaning to ‘going places’.


Moin Shaikh (L), Director , Innovative Telecom & Softwares, offered the perfect solution to

Vaidyanathan Iyer, CIO, Nakoda.

IT HAS definitely moved out of the datacenters. It now plays a key role in increasing business efficiencies. Growth in business thus naturally

translates into increased pressure on a

Nakoda replaced its existing hardware for a more robust solution proposed by Surat-based Innovative Telecom & Softwares. By Radhika Nallayam

company’s core IT infrastructure. For Gujarat-based Nakoda, aggressive ex-pansion would not have been possible without the backing of a reliable and robust IT infrastructure. Its existing

infrastructure clearly could not meet the growing business requirements.

BSE-listed Nakoda Limited, which clocked revenues of Rs 637 crore in the third quarter of 2012, has been di-versifying into various businesses that span from manufacturing of raw ma-terials to wind farm equipment. No-kada’s acquisition of a South Korean Polyester plant in 2010 straight away triggered off its plans to go for a full-blown SAP implementation. The home grown applications that the company was using had to be replaced for cer-tain. But equally important was put-ting a robust hardware system in place that could take the growing load.

“We wanted to go for an inte-grated IT platform that allows us to centrally plan, control and optimize

MORE LESSWITH


P h o t o g r a p h b y V I P U L VA G H A S I YA

Key Parties: Nakoda, Innovative Telecom & Softwares

Location: Surat

Deal Size: Rs 60 lakh

Implementation Time: Three months

Main Vendor: IBM (IBM BladeCenter servers, IBM System Storage DS5020 and Tivoli Storage Manager)

Key People Involved: Vaidyanathan V. Iyer, CIO, Nakoda; Moin Shaikh, Director, Innovative Telecom & Softwares

Challenges: Convincing the customer to migrate from existing platform to a new hardware platform, training the customer on new technology, price war from competition

Post Implementation ROI: Less hardware to manage, long-term cost savings, reduced power consumption, improved business processes and efficiency

Snapshotdor suggested, there was a significant memory and hard disc saving. This means the solution was both techni-cally and commercially more viable for us,” says Iyer.

The result—Nakoda willingly paid a premium to Innovative, though the competition had offered a cheaper so-lution. The customer was convinced to go in with a higher initial invest-ment, for it would mean less hard-ware to manage and a scalable sys-tem that won’t require a refresh for next five years. Thus, a price war that would have otherwise been a tough hurdle became an obvious choice for Innovative.

“We really appreciated the ap-proach of the partner, who worked towards a solution without allowing business to take precedence. So we were more than ready to pay a pre-mium. Besides, the solution offered long term cost advantages. We also considered the comfort of Innovative being a local player. It has presence in regions where we have our offices. They have their local engineers, and we thought it will be easier to work with them,” says Iyer.

The extra margin from a customer who moved from a competing vendor platform was literally icing on the cake.

The challenging part however was introducing the customer to a new technology. The IT team at Nakoda had never used a Unix platform and Innovative’s solution was com-pletely Unix-based. Though small, Nokoda had a dynamic IT team in place which was prepared to learn new things. Innovative, on its part, assured Iyer that his team would be trained on Unix.

POST IMPLEMENTATION The infrastructure went live in Janu-ary last year. The SAP implementa-tion part was carried out by PwC. A year later, Iyer and his team are quite content about their choice. Nokoda has now standardized and stream-lined business operations, which has resulted in improved efficiency. A comprehensive ERP system, a ro-bust hardware infrastructure and a trustworthy partner to work with are surely reasons for any business to stay confident.

workloads, while keeping data ac-curacy and integrity up-to-date,” says Vaidyanathan V. Iyer, CIO of Nakoda. Though all of its applications were running on HP hardware, Iyer want-ed to ensure Nokada implements only the right solution. Not one to take any hasty decisions, he chose to consider an IBM platform, along with HP, be-fore finalizing the right platform.

THE TOUGH MIGRATION The deal was by no means a hit or miss for Innovative Telecom & Soft-wares, a long-standing IBM partner from Surat. Acquiring a competition-account means a lot to any SI. But Moin Shaikh, Director of Innovative, knew very well that its competitors would try to bag the deal by any means necessary, as Nakoda was an already existing account for them. Innovative was hence well-prepared, and studied the customer require-ment very carefully.

Apart from a less complex infra-structure, Innovative realized that they would have to come up with a very scalable solution that could ad-dress the customer’s requirements for at least few more years. “We had plans to scale up from 200 users to around 800 users eventually. At the same time, we did not want to make any further investments on hardware for the next five years,” says Iyer.

Innovative proposed that Na-koda migrate to IBM platform. “We proposed a solution on IBM Power Systems built with IBM BladeCenter servers, IBM System Storage DS5020 and Tivoli Storage Manager. The solution additionally offered benefits like less space to reside and lower power consumption. The amount of hardware that went into our solution was much less compared to the solu-tion proposed by the competing part-ner,” says Shaikh.

Migration to a new platform was still not a small decision for Nakoda. Like any other customer, Nakoda did everything possible to evaluate the right solution. “I have used both platforms during various stages of my career and I knew the pros and cons of both technologies. So during negotiations, we had in-depth discussions about what

CASE STUDY

unique advantage each solution can provide,” says Iyer.

Iyer had still not made up his mind about which solution to implement. A POC was thus conducted by both In-novative and the competing partner. SAP data was also tested to evaluate the end result of implementing a full blown SAP ERP system onto the pro-posed hardware. The results swayed in favor of Innovative.

LESS HARDWARE, MORE EFFORT Besides the technical suitability of the solution, Iyer was quite impressed with the SI’s honesty. He feels that Innovative’s focus was more towards delivering an appropriate solution and less towards making margins. “We have very often observed and ex-perienced that channel partners want more business and hence they try to sell more hardware to create more business. But that was not the case with Innovative. They came up with a solution that suited all our needs. As compared to what our existing ven-


AFEW YEARS ago, Hertz learned that innovation isn’t just a luxury to be taken out for a test drive now and then, but rather

a business imperative. Without new ideas constantly in the pipeline, the car rental giant would get run over by its competitors.

“We get copied a lot,” says CIO Jo-seph Eckroth. “Our competitors see [our innovations], and six months to a year later, they’re introducing their own versions of it. Speed of thought and speed to market are absolutely critical for us to keep our lead. If we stop, we’re dead.”

Hertz isn’t the only company that hears its competitors’ footsteps and is relying on innovation to maintain its edge. Indeed, a loosening up of IT budgets and the race for competitive advantage in a post-recession world, coupled with a flood of new technol-ogy platforms, have created the perfect storm for business innovation.

But these days, innovators must play by a new set of rules. IT leaders find themselves taking a fresh look at proj-ect management and resource planning as they seek to accommodate business demands for speed-to-market while as-sessing a deluge of new tools driven by new technologies. Developing the “next big thing” requires fearlessness, a fast pace and a fascination with new ideas,

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y U n n i k r i s h n a n A . V

not to mention reliable partners and an open-minded team of professionals who can imagine the possibilities—a tall order in an often “command-and-control” IT environment.

Here’s a look at how four IT ex-ecutives have learned to “fail fast and move on” with innovation while main-taining a competitive advantage in a cutthroat marketplace.

SEEKING THE ULTIMATE GUEST EXPERIENCEThe next time you visit a Hyatt hotel, you may be part of one of its experi-ments to improve the customer experi-ence, perhaps without even knowing it. Hyatt Hotels and Resorts wants to reinvent the art of hospitality through technology. So it has identified eight “lab hotels”—four in the US, four abroad—where John Prusnick, direc-tor of IT innovation and strategy, leads major, “disruptive” IT experiments.

“We’re not looking at just wanting to improve upon current solutions,” Prus-nick explains. “We’re trying to come up with ideas that are transformative.”

At any time, there are seven to nine unique projects under way at the lab hotels, and IT spends no more than 90 days on any one idea. Failure is defi-nitely an option.

“Quite honestly, almost every idea fails fast. The solution we settle on

relies on iterations of the original idea. Many times, perhaps as high as 60 per-cent of the time, we find that we revisit the original idea and find the solution to be something completely different,” says Prusnick. The projects that don’t make the big time are chalked up to “return on experience” rather than ROI, he adds.

One of Hyatt’s most successful ideas emerged from the business side and was put to the test in a lab hotel. Hyatt International’s president announced that the company needed to change the way guests check in. The Rooms Operations team, together with IT, de-cided to get rid of the front desks and make every associate a “host.” The IT team created a mobile tool to untether front desk staffers and allow them to move about the lobby and interact with guests in a more personal way. The iOS-based iPad application includes hardware for credit-card swiping and encoding room keycards. The lab trial was so successful that the company decided to expand the mobile solution even further.

At the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Chi-cago, mobile hosts are now stationed at the airport shuttle center, where they greet guests, check them in and issue room keys. “That has been a huge win for us from a customer intimacy stand-point,” says Prusnick. “The guests feel

In the new 'fail fast and move on' world of business, IT is learning to quickly tap into creative ideas and harness the power of innovation for competitive advantage. —By Stacy Collett

THINK ONYOUR FEET

n FEATURE | INNOVATION


like they’re being greeted in a VIP way. They don’t have to wait in line, so that saves them time.”

As the keeper of Hyatt’s major in-novation projects, Prusnick’s biggest challenge is making sure everybody re-alizes that they’re all on the same team.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m stepping on other people’s toes,” he says. “Mak-ing sure that we can facilitate great co-operation between IT and the business can sometimes be a challenge.” That’s especially true when other depart-ments come up with innovative proj-ects on their own and Prusnick has to intervene to make corrections or stop the project until the innovation team determines if it’s really needed.

“At the end of the day, everybody is looking for the best experience pos-sible for our guests and [employees],” he says. “We all have the same goal. It’s just a case of who gets to run it and be the project manager.” In fact, all em-ployees are trained in “Hyatt Think-ing,” meaning they’re encouraged to come up with ways to improve existing solutions. “We’re trying to introduce this culture of innovation,” he adds. “That’s everybody’s job.”

PARTNERS = SPEED TO MARKETThe biggest banks are continually de-veloping new services and payment ap-plications. Speed to market and unique offerings are required to stay ahead of the pack.

At Capital One, Monique Shivana-ndan, senior vice president and CTO, relies on a new innovation lab team and trusted partners in the startup and university realms to bring new ideas to market fast.

In 2010, Shivanandan launched the Capital One innovation lab and staffed it with 20 “hard-core developers and product managers” in San Francisco and Washington. She then partnered with the FinTech Innovation Lab, a development organization that brings together New York area startups fo-cused on banking applications, to tap into ideas and expertise from the out-side. So far, the partnership is credited for new offerings such as Capital One’s Mobile Deals app.

“It’s been an incredible opportunity for both of us,” says Shivanandan. “We’ve been able to get into the mar-

ketplace a little bit quicker because we have these relationships, and we’ve been able to help some very small companies really advance their agendas and frame the product or service so they’re more realistic and more marketable.”

She also partners with research groups at Massachussets Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech and Stanford.

The lab works on just three to four projects at a time, and a steering com-mittee made up of business and IT leaders meets quarterly to develop a list of promising ideas to work on in the next two to three months.

“If you have the product people sitting next to the developers sitting next to the testing folks, and you’re all just working through it in a very rapid and iterative cycle, you will get some-thing very good in 60 to 90 days,” says Shivanandan. “It may not be perfect, but you will have such a good idea of what it is.”

Sometimes, ideas that might have been scrapped by one business unit may turn out to be valuable to another part of the company. Capital One’s team discovered, for instance, that a credit card project that was about to be killed was well suited for the small business banking group. Now in incu-

bation, the project is a big bet for 2014, she says.

Not every project makes it to the fin-ish line, and that’s OK with Shivanan-dan. “A failure is sometimes the biggest success because you didn’t spend $10 million (about Rs 54 crore) finding out that it didn’t work,” says Shivanandan.

That’s also one of the biggest chal-lenges of leading an innovation team, she adds. “If you get one out of a thousand ideas implemented, that’s a good rate. Just make sure that people on the team understand that not ev-erything is going to be implemented, and that’s OK. We’ve learned from that, but the individuals sometimes don’t feel that way.” Sometimes projects fail fast and then sit on a shelf until technology catches up to the idea. For instance, in late 2008, Hertz tried to launch car rental kiosks similar to those used by airlines. “It failed pretty fast,” Eckroth recalls. “Our process is so much more cumbersome than just checking in for your boarding pass and picking a seat. There are so many added things we want to sell, so it really didn’t take off.”

Hertz scrapped the kiosks by early 2009. Fast-forward to 2010, when an IT employee learned about a company that developed video integration tech-nology. Team members surmised that if they used the new technology and worked with their key suppliers to put it together, they could create a more interactive, personalized kiosk that would solve the problems they encoun-tered with the basic kiosk technology.

The new kiosks have two interactive video screens. When a customer picks up a receiver, a centralized customer service rep pops up and can complete the entire rental transaction remotely. The rep can even suggest optional ser-vices, print the rental agreement and give customers access to their car keys in a safe—24 hours a day.

In 2011, Hertz’s new ExpressRent kiosks hit major airports and have since catapulted the company into new markets. “This has been a real game-changer,” Eckroth says. “We have re-duced line waits in most of our major airports and shaved peak staffing re-quirements. We can serve markets we weren’t able to serve before—we now have these [kiosks and rental cars] at

Show Me The MoneyIT departments are developing creative ways to fund innovation projects—from both inside and outside the company.

For instance, at Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, depending on the scope of the project, “we either get some funding from the hotel [where the project takes place] or we take corporate dollars and invest in those properties,” says John Prusnick, director of IT innovation and strategy. The hotels are corporate-owned, “so we’re not taking particular interest in an indi-vidual owner or franchise,” he adds.

The hotel chain also works with third-party IT partners that “sometimes have brilliant ideas and wish to try them out,” Prusnick says. “We give them a venue and opportunity to [try out new ideas], and they help to fund some of that effort.”

— By Stacy Collett


Still, all Steelcase employees have the opportunity to come up with ideas and participate in experiments if they wish, and their enthusiasm for innovation work continues to grow.

“It’s starting to feel like [innova-tion] is not just centered in one part of the organization. Anyone can participate,” Krestakos says. “I think that’s critically important to [building] optimism inside the organization.”

For its part, Hertz seeks innovative ideas from all corners of the organization as a way to stay ahead in the rental car race. “We’re making some big bets [on innovation], and that’s exciting,” Eckroth says. “If you’re not willing to do that, you have to be willing to become a commodity and run in second or third place.” n

But Krestakos says it’s important to balance innovation projects and other IT responsibilities. Otherwise, resource constraints on either end can cause conflicts.

“IT organizations have their own projects, commitments and timetables, and innovation can sometimes be seen as a distraction,” Krestakos explains. “So we don’t want to have too many things in flight from an innovation standpoint, but enough to keep us busy and thinking about what’s possible.”

In many cases, partners can help organizations bridge resource gaps. For example, Steelcase often enlists the MIT Media Lab and its more than 140 master’s degree and Ph.D. student researchers to harness “outside thinking” and help Steelcase formulate hypotheses and conduct research that goes along with an idea, Krestakos adds.

hotels, body shops and parking garages in New York City.”

A METHOD TO THEIR MADNESSThough ideas may run wild during brainstorming sessions, the process of refining a great idea into a work-able plan usually includes a defined methodology.

Each quarter, the innovation management team at Steelcase, a workplace furnishings and services provider in Grand Rapids, Michigan, convenes an innovation meeting with representatives of all areas of the business. The innovation manage-ment office leader, who reports to the CIO, poses a single question to the group, such as “How do we create more efficiency in our manufacturing process?” He then uses a methodolo-gy developed by Palo Alto design firm IDEO to guide team members toward new ideas.

The methodology is the company’s secret sauce for experimentation, says CIO Bob Krestakos. “IDEO is kind of our mentor in terms of design thinking methodologies,” he says. “That meth-odology is applied to various areas of the business. It creates some of the ideas that we follow up on.”

IDEO’s philosophy is that virtually everyone has the capacity to innovate, but over time, people tend to lose their belief in their own creativity. Techniques such as defining problems through direct observation, develop-ing empathy, encouraging people to come up with many ideas quickly, and fostering collaboration among col-leagues with radically different view-points all help people regain their creative confidence.

The group comes up with three to five projects that they will work on for three to five months, depending on the experiment’s complexity and promise.

The company recently found suc-cess experimenting with RFID tech-nology as a way to improve its lean manufacturing model, says Krestakos. As the first deployment of the technol-ogy rolls out in North America, the company is developing prototypes of other RFID-based systems in an effort to find more applications. “It has really snowballed into something that I think can be really significant,” he adds.

Shaking Things Up

It’s easy to create a technology wish list, but the devil is in the details, which could ex-plain why some IT workers aren’t enthused by innovation projects.

“The challenge for IT people is that we come traditionally from a lens of ‘command-and-control,’” says John Prusnick, director of IT innovation and strategy at Hyatt Hotels and Resorts. “We want to have things standardized, lock them down and make sure they work. We want consistency in delivery, and we don’t want to have changes intro-duced that will cause us grief down the road.”

While empathetic to that viewpoint, Prusnick encourages IT staffers to understand the importance of continually trying to improve their products. “We want them to change to a more communicative and collaborative way and have dialogue with us-ers on how they can improve their offerings,” he says. It could be as simple as adding pictures to Active Directory, so people know who’s sending an e-mail, he adds. In the past, IT staffers would have balked at such an idea because it would create new in-frastructure needs. But today, “they understand what the user needs to become more productive and effective,” Prusnick says. “They will incrementally improve that product by implementing that feature or function.”

Day-to-day IT responsibilities and the uncertainty of “experiments” can also limit IT staff’s involvement in innovation projects. “There has to be some negotiations about how time can be made in a person’s schedule for these workshops and to follow up on ideas,” says Bob Krestakos, CIO at Steelcase. “But once you have a couple of ideas that really take hold that come from that innovation mentality, it gets easier and easier” to get IT employees involved.

At Hertz, CIO Joseph Eckroth doesn’t try to fit all IT employees into the innovation mold. “Not everyone is entirely comfortable with the process by which we [innovate],” he says. But when it comes to the core innovation team, “you’ve got to hire and select people who have in their DNA the ability to create turbulence,” he adds. “They question and [blend] the normal discussion with disruptive discussion. That’s the type of people I want to have” in brainstorming sessions.

— By Stacy Collett

n FEATURE | INNOVATION


LAST YEAR, the tech world saw a large number of high-profile attacks and

data breaches, and secu-rity experts say threats will evolve and escalate this year. BYOD, cloud and advanced persistent threats (APTs) remain top of mind for many, and experts agree that those

A new year is upon us, but threats and breaches will persist. By Thor Olavsrud

threats will continue to play a significant role in the threat landscape in 2013. But will this finally be the year that mobile malware leaves its mark? What other new threats lay on the horizon?

MOBILE THREATSFor years, security experts have predicted the rise of

EVERYTHING ABOUT SECURITY

FocalPoint

mobile malware, and this year is no exception. Many experts expect mobile threats to escalate in 2013.

“We will see the first major malware on a mobile platform,” Seth Goldhammer, director of product management at LogRhythm, provider of a security information and event management (SIEM) IT platform. “There has already been malware that has made it into the An-droid Play Store and even Apple’s App Store. Given that the large majority of mobile devices run without any type of malware detec-tion, it is inevitable that we are prone for a major, dis-ruptive malware possibly posing as an update for a popular application.”

“The BYOD phenom-enon—that tablets and smart phones outpace lap-tops in sales—means it is very likely these devices are participating on corpo-rate networks even though IT may have put up safety guards to prevent their use,” Goldhammer adds.

“For enterprises, this means that IT needs greater visibility into how these devices are interact-ing with the environment and the specific behavior of these devices to recognize when communications alter,” Goldhammer says. “A significant deviation in communication pat-terns may reflect malware spread. If these devices are participating inside the corporate network, this could prove to be very disruptive, not only due to the increase in network ac-tivity but malware moving from mobile to standard operating systems.”

The popular Android mo-bile operating system, with its open ecosystem, may

prove an especially attrac-tive target to cybercrimi-nals. Trend Micro predicts that the number of mali-cious and high-risk Android apps will increase three-fold from about 350,000 in 2012 to more than one mil-lion in 2013, broadly in line with the predicted growth of the OS itself.

“In terms of market share, Android may be on its way to dominating the mobile space the same way that Windows dominated the desktop/laptop arena,” Trend Micro notes in its Se-curity Threats to Business, the Digital Lifestyle and the Cloud: Trend Micro Predic-tions for 2013 and Beyondreport. “Malicious and high-risk Android apps are becoming more sophisticat-ed. An “arms race” between Android attackers and se-curity providers is likely to occur in the coming year, much as one occurred a decade or more ago over Microsoft Windows.”

One particular area of concern is malware that buys apps from an app store without user permis-sion. McAfee points to the Android/Marketpay.A Tro-jan, which already exists, and predicts we’ll see crim-inals add it as a payload to a mobile worm in 2013.

“Buying apps developed by malware authors puts money in their pockets,” McAfee Labs suggests in its 2013 Threats Predictions report. “A mobile worm that uses exploits to propagate over numerous vulnerable phones is the perfect plat-form for malware that buys such apps; attackers will no longer need victims to install a piece of malware. If user interaction isn’t needed, there will be nothing to pre-vent a mobile worm from go-ing on a shopping spree.”

On Guard


McAfee also has con-cerns about the near-field communications (NFC) capabilities that are ap-pearing on an increasing number of mobile devices.

“As users are able to make “tap and pay” purchases in more locations, they’ll carry their digital wallets every-where,” McAfee Labs says. “That flexibility will, unfor-tunately, also be a boon to thieves. Attackers will cre-ate mobile worms with NFC capabilities to propagate (via the “bump and infect” method) and steal money. Malware writers will thrive in areas with dense popula-tions (airports, malls, theme parks, etcetera.). An NFC-enabled worm could run rampant through a large crowd, infecting victims and potentially stealing from their wallet accounts.”

McAfee also reports that malware that blocks mobile devices from receiving se-curity updates is likely to appear in 2013.

MOBILE RANSOMWARERansomware—in which criminals hijack a user’s capability to access data, communicate or use the system at all and then forces the user to pay a ransom to regain access—spiked in 2012 and is likely to keep growing in 2013, says McAfee.

“Ransomware on Win-dows PCs has more than tripled during the past year,” McAfee Labs re-ports. “Attackers have proven that this ‘business model’ works and are scal-ing up their attacks to in-crease profits.”

McAfee Labs says it ex-pects to see both Android and Apple’s OS X as targets of ransomware in 2013 as ransomware kits, similar to the malware kits currently

available in the under-ground market, proliferate.

“One limitation for many malware authors seeking profit from mobile devices is that more users transact business on desk-top PCs than on tablets or phones,” McAfee Labs says. “But this trend may not last; the convenience of portable browsers will likely lead more people to do their business on the go. Attackers have already developed ransomware

for mobile devices. What if the ransom demand included threats to dis-tribute recorded calls and pictures taken with the phone? We anticipate con-siderably more activity in this area during 2013.”

AlienVault, provider of a unified security manage-ment solution, agrees, “We will see new ransomware tactics in 2013 as a result of the poor economy and the success of this type of attack [reportedly, cybercriminals

raked in $5 million ( Rs 27 crore) using ransomware tactics in 2012].”

WINDOWS STILL A TARGETOn the Windows front, Trend Micro reports that Windows 8 will offer consumers key security improvements—especially the secure boot and early launch anti-malware (ELAM) features. How-ever, enterprises are un-likely to see these benefits

n FOCAL POINT | SECURITY


UNLESS mobile device security is vastly im-proved, smartphones

and tablets are expected to become a significant launch-ing pad for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against corporate websites, a research firm says.

The lack of security on the majority of mobile devices, coupled with rising bandwidth and processing power, makes them a platform ripe for hack-ers to compromise, Javelin Strategy & Research says.

In addition, launching DDoS attacks from mobile devices would require less technical skills than those used last year to disrupt the websites of several major US financial institutions.

“There’s not very many reasons why [mobile DDoS] can’t happen,” says Javelin analyst Al Pascual.

Indeed, other researchers reported last year finding Android malware that could be used to launch DDoS attacks. Dr. Web, a Russian anti-virus and security firm, was the first to report find-ing a Trojan designed for that purpose, says Rivalhost, which provides managed Web hosting.

The malware, dubbed Android.DDoS.1.origin, was disguised as a Google Play app and would take the victim to the Google store in order to divert suspicion. In reality the app communicated with a hacker-controlled server and stayed idle until it received instructions via SMS that identified the server and port the app was to bombard with information packets, Rivalhost said.

Separately, McAfee re-ported finding that a common DDoS tool called Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) had been re-designed for the Android plat-form. An Anonymous group in Latin America promoted the porting technique, which re-quired no programming skills.

While no DDoS attacks have been linked to mobile devices, Pascual is convinced it’s only a matter of time. A recent Javelin survey found that less than a third of mobile devices in the US had security software, which meant more than 102 million devices were unprotected.

Android is particularly vul-nerable because of the many online stores distributing apps for the platform. Stores out-

side the US have become sig-nificant sources for malware.

While it would take thou-sands of smartphones to equal the attack volume of compro-mised servers used in the latest bank attacks, such large-scale DDoS are not in the majority. In a report released last February, Radware found that three-quarters of attacks were less than 1Gbps in bandwidth. The lower bandwidth attacks tend to target the application layer of Web servers, rather than focus on taking down networks.

Attacks originating from mobile devices would be more difficult to stop without disrupt-ing service to site visitors, Pas-cual says. For example, banks often locate where an attack is coming from, typically outside the US, and then divert the bogus traffic.

To make it difficult for hack-ers to compromise mobile de-vices, banks and retailers should educate customers about secu-rity on smartphones and tablets, Pascual says. In addition, organi-zations need to pressure carriers and manufacturers to release software updates quickly.

— By Antone Gonsalves

Mobile Devices Could Be The Next DDoS Attack Tool

JANUARY 1, 2009 CHANNELWORLD 49

in the coming year. Gartner analysts believe most enter-prises won’t begin to roll out Windows 8 in large numbers until 2014 at the earliest.

McAfee suggests that at-tackers targeting Windows of all varieties will expand their use of sophisticated and devastating below-the-kernel attacks.

“The evolution of com-puter security software and other defenses on client endpoints is driving threats into different areas of the operating system stack, es-pecially for covert and per-sistent attackers,” McAfee Labs says.

“The frequency of threats attacking Microsoft Win-dows below the kernel are increasing. Some of the critical assets targeted include the BIOS, master boot record (MBR), volume boot record (VBR), GUID Partition Table (GPT) and NTLoader,” McAfee Labs says. “Although the volume of these threats is unlikely to approach that of simpler attacks on Windows and applications, the impact of these complex attacks can be far more devastating. We expect to see more threats in this area during 2013.”

HTML5 INCREASES THE ATTACK SURFACEThis year will see continu-ing adoption of HTML5. McAfee notes that it provides language im-provements, capabilities to remove the need for plug-ins, new layout ren-dering options and pow-erful APIs that support local data storage, device access, 2D/3D rendering, web-socket communication ,and more. While HTML5 offers a number of security improvements—McAfee believes there will be a re-duction in exploits focused

on plug-ins as browsers provide that functionality through their new media capabilities and APIs—it also suggests the additional functionality will create a larger attack surface.

“One of the primary separations between a na-tive application and an HTML application has been the ability of the former to perform arbitrary network connections on the client,” McAfee Labs says. “HTML5 increases the attack surface for every user, as its features do not require extensive policy or access controls. Thus they allow a page served from the Internet to exploit WebSocket function-ality and poke around the user’s local network.”

“In the past,” McAfee reports, “this opportunity

for attackers was limited because any malicious use was thwarted by the same-origin policy, which has been a cornerstone of security in HTML-based products. With HTML5, however, cross origin resource sharing will let scripts from one domain make network requests, post data, and access data from the target domain, thereby allowing HTML pages to perform reconnaissance and limited operations on the user’s network.”

DESTRUCTIVE ATTACKSExperts also expect a rise in destructive attacks in 2013 by hacktivists and state actors.

“In 2013, we will see further destructive attacks (cybersabotage and cy-berweaponry) on utilities and critical infrastruc-ture systems,” says Harry Sverdlove, CTO of security firm Bit9. “We saw Sham-oon wipe out the systems of a major oil company in the Middle East, and that company’s cybersecurity was no more lax than com-parable companies in the United States or Europe. We know the bad guys have the ability to disrupt these systems, all they need is motive.”

LogRythm’s Goldham-mer agrees: “We should also expect to see an increase in nation state attacks and hacktiv-ism. It might be hard for some people to believe

that we’ll see an increase in 2013 after so many well-documented and publicized attacks, but I expect we’ll see hacktiv-ists take much more ag-gressive measures.”

While earlier attacks may have just embarrassed a country or company via website defacement or exposing their databases publicly, Goldhammer says he expects that to change: “I can see splinter cells of hackers take more aggressive means to cripple networks or corrupt data, or use ransom tactics, in order to financially punish or tactically weaken. In 2012, more and more

evidence shows nation states using malware or using exploits to gain information or to attack infrastructure. In 2013, I expect to see headlines talking about a growing number of nation states building exploits against each other, both for data retrieval, data corruption and damage to infrastructure.” McAfee and Trend Micro both concur.“Destructive payloads in malware have become rare because attackers prefer to take control of their victims’ computers for financial gain or to steal intellectual property,” McAfee Labs says. “Recently, however, we have seen several attacks—some apparently targeted,

others implemented as worms-in which the only goal was to cause as much damage as possible. We expect this malicious behavior to grow in 2013.”

“Whether this is hacktivism taken to a new level, as some claim, or just malicious intent is impossible to say, but the worrying fact is that companies appear to be rather vulnerable to such attacks,” McAfee adds. “As with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the technical bar for the hackers to hurdle is rather low. If attackers can install destructive malware on a large number of machines, then the result can be devastating.” n

Ransomware—in which criminals hijack a user’s capability to access data, communicate or use the system at all and then forces the user to pay a ransom to regain access—spiked in 2012 and is likely to keep growing in 2013.


50 CHANNELWORLD JANUARY 1, 2009

Here are 11 things you should commit to doing this year to keep hackers and malware at bay. By PCWorld Staff

Stay Safe

AMONG YOUR typical New Year’s resolutions—lose weight, stop

smoking, be happier—you should consider making some pledges to better secure your digital life. You might even be healthier if you can prevent the stress of a digital disaster, like malware wiping out your PC, having your online accounts hacked, or becoming a victim of identify theft because of a phishing scam or data theft. With that in mind, here are some security resolutions you should consider for the new year.

USE PIN PROTECTION ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICESSmartphones and tablets

are mini computers, and if they get lost or stolen, others may be able to access your e-mail and social networks, browse through your photos, files, and text messages, and access other accounts that you’ve downloaded apps for. However, you can enable lock screen protection to require a PIN or password before using your device.

How you turn on PIN protection varies between devices, but you should be able to find it in your phone or tablet’s settings app. A password or PIN isn’t foolproof, but it’s a good first line of defense against snoopers and would-be data thieves.

INSTALL ANTI-THEFT APPS ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICESIf your smartphone, iPad, or tablet gets lost or stolen when you’re out and about there’s a good chance you’ll never see it again. But hav-ing an anti-theft solution increases your chances of recovery. You could re-motely locate it on a map from another device or PC, make it play a siren to help you find it (useful for when your phone slips between the couch cushions), or wipe your device if you think you won’t get it back.

Many mobile carriers of-fer an anti-theft or remote locating service, but there are also free apps you can download for your Android or iOS device. Take a look at Lookout Mobile Security for Android, which also includes protection against Android malware. If you own an iOS device, the free Find My iPhone and Find My iPad apps from Apple are worth downloading.

THE SAME GOES FOR YOUR LAPTOPLike with smartphones and tablets, you can setup an anti-theft solution on your laptop. And if it becomes lost or stolen you can remotely locate it via Wi-Fi positioning and IP address locations, if someone connects it to the Internet. Some anti-theft solutions let you remotely control the Web cam and monitor the screen as well, further helping you to find the thief.

Some laptops come with a built-in anti-theft solution within the BIOS so it’s still locatable if the thief wipes or replaces the hard drive. But if yours doesn’t support this you can still install an anti-theft application. Lojack

for Laptops is one option, and it works on both Mac OS X and Windows. Prey and GadgetTrak are other services worth considering.

PERFORM PC SECURITY CHECKSYou should periodically perform a thorough securi-ty check of your PC. Anti-virus is a must-have, but it doesn’t detect all vulner-abilities. It doesn’t always check for missing security updates for Windows, and for vulnerable applications like Abode Reader and Flash, Java, and your Web browser. And they usually don’t analyze your pass-words to detect weak ones.

ENCRYPT YOUR LAPTOPA Windows password prevents the average Joe from booting up your com-puter and accessing your files and personal docu-ments, but it can easily be removed or bypassed. A thief or snooper could re-move the hard drive, con-nect it to another computer, and access your files that way. Or they could use a special CD to remove your Windows password and then be able to log into your Windows account.

Since a laptop can be eas-ily lost or stolen, it’s a good idea to encrypt your entire hard drive, which prevents someone from removing or bypassing your password. Check out our tutorial to learn how to go about it.

ENCRYPT YOUR USB DRIVESExternal USB and flash drives are easy to lose, and all someone has to do is plug them into their computer to access your files. With that in mind, if you ever transfer or store any sensitive documents

n FOCAL POINT | SECURITY


JANUARY 1, 2009 CHANNELWORLD 51

on external drives, you should consider encrypting them, which requires you to enter a password before you can get at your files. You can buy drives that come encrypted or you can encrypt any drive yourself. Whatever route you go, it’s best to use those with 256-bit AES encryption. Also, consider buying those “FIPS 140-2 Level 2” or higher certification.

SECURE YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNTSIf you aren’t taking on social networks seriously, it’s only a matter of time before you get taken by malicious links and social apps that try to steal your personal informa-tion or money, or spread spam. And that doesn’t even include the privacy is-sues in play—you probably don’t want your employer to see all your personal life. So consider securing your social network security and privacy settings. Take a close look at the security and privacy settings for the social networks you use; learn what each of the set-tings mean, and adjust them as you see fit.

Also, think about using a security app to help catch threats and keep up with the latest threats via sites like Facecrooks. Some current security suites, like Trend Micro’s, include features that will check your Facebook privacy settings, and offer suggestions for improving your privacy.

SIGN UP FOR ONLINE BACKUPSYou probably know that you should create a backup of your computer’s hard drive, just in case. But what happens if your backup disk goes bad? Using an online

backup service is a good way to protect your most valuable documents, just in case double-disaster strikes and both your hard drive and backup go dead, or both are destroyed in a diaster. There are plenty of services out there, and some anti-virus companies provide online backup services for their customers.

That said, security practices can vary between online storage providers.

INSTALL A TWOWAY FIREWALLA firewall helps block

hackers from being able to access your computer via the Internet and local net-work by controlling what traffic can pass through. Windows comes with a firewall, but by default it only monitors incoming traffic. To help catch mal-ware or other malicious applications from sending data from your computer, the firewall needs to also monitor your outgoing traffic. If you use an all-in-one security suite like Norton Internet Security or McAfee Internet Se-curity, you likely already

have a two-way firewall. But if you don’t, consider using standalone two-way firewall like those from ZoneAlarm or Comodo.

USE OpenDNS FOR CONTENT FILTERINGAn Internet content filter is a great idea regardless of whether you have youngsters in the home. In addition to blocking adult and other inappropriate sites, OpenDNS can help block virus-spreading sites and other dangerous corners of the Internet. Best of all, the basic-level OpenDNS service is free and you can apply it both to individual computers or to your entire network.

CHECK YOUR WI-FI SECURITYIf your Wi-Fi network isn’t encrypted—that is, if you don’t have to enter a password when connecting—anyone nearby can connect to the network and intercept your Internet traffic. To keep unauthorized users off your network, you’ll want to make your wireless router in your home is set up with wireless security: Wi-Fi Protect Access (WPA or WPA2).

To check if your wireless router is secured bring up the list of available wireless networks in Windows. Those that aren’t encrypted will have a warning indicator next to them and those that are will show the security type when you hover your mouse pointer over the network names. If yours isn’t secured refer to the manual that came with your router for instructions on how to turn on encryption. n

OVER half of the UK’s business IT networks (51 percent) were breached during 2012 due to employees using their

personal devices at work, according to research carried out by Virgin Media Business.

Some 500 British CIOs were questioned on the pitfalls of the consumerization of IT and BYOD schemes for the survey.

It was also revealed that networks were more likely to be compromised in larger organisations with SMEs experiencing 25 percent fewer security breaches.

However, Tony Grace, chief operating officer at Virgin Media Business, said that businesses shouldn’t be too concerned with the results.

“Last year was clearly a bumpy road for companies introduc-ing personal devices at work. That’s natural enough as noone has so far been able to come up with the magic solution,” said Grace.

“CIOs shouldn’t see this as a burden and in 2013 they can take the lessons learned and turn these personal devices into business enablers to really help drive the bottom line.”

“With sales of tablets expected to have gone through the roof over Christmas, it looks like personal devices in the work-place is here to stay,” said Grace.

“But with just a fifth of large firms having a BYOD policy, businesses will continue to experience security breaches until connectivity, security and user policies are put in place.”

At the end of last year Blue Coat’s Mobility Study found that most organizations allow employees access to company e-mail (83 percent) and instant messaging (56 percent) on personal devices, but far fewer open up ERP (31 percent), sales force automation (24 percent) and supply chain man-agement (19 percent) applications to mobile devices that aren’t corporate-owned.

— By Derek du Preez

BYOD Was a Bane In 2012


X EROX INDIA, with Ernst & Young, recently came out with the first-ever survey on Managed Print

Services (MPS) in India. The survey projects a high growth rate of 30 percent for MPS services in India. Xe-rox is bullish and focused on tapping into this potential market. The MPS market in India is among the fastest growing in the world, and is in the early stage of adop-tion with a vast untapped opportunity for the market to expand.

MPS offers an opportunity for both large and small enterprises in India to control costs, enhance document security and improve productivity of their print environments. Xerox is uniquely positioned to provide superior business value to customers. Our services business is also thriving, and more clients are turning to us for MPS to help save costs and boost ef-ficiency, productivity and security. Xerox’s MPS offer-ings contribute a fair share towards our fast expanding services business in India. We have responded to this trend by giving more emphasis on our services-led, technology-driven engagement model.

We successfully created significant beachheads in this space in the region, and we are in the process of replicating and industrializing the service delivery model so we can provide sustained performance, cost efficiencies, and productivity benefits to enterprises of all sizes in order for them to be able to deliver superior customer experience. Our MPS offerings are enhancing customer experience across industry verticals primar-ily financial services sector, telecom, consumer goods, retail and manufacturing.

S INCE INDIA is one of the fastest-growing markets, Ricoh has a special focus on managed document

services (MDS) offerings, which we like to tag as “MPS and beyond”. Given the fast-changing business environ-ment, we expect document process outsourcing (DPO) to lead to business process outsourcing (BPO). Ricoh India is building capabilities in the IT services space, which aligns well with our MDS offerings.

Business decision-makers want document output strate-gies to be in line with their business objectives, apart from having a consistent procurement strategy and greater secu-rity for their knowledge. But, only a few organizations have visibility on the capabilities and the utilization of their document processing devices. Thus, organizations are not able to assess the full utilization of their assets.

Ricoh’s strategy is to address gaps in the current environment by providing professional consulting services to help streamline document output capabil-ity and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Ricoh’s sales approach is highly consultative in nature and customized to each customer’s needs, by bringing value through MDS while helping them lower their carbon footprint too.

MDS defines a clear strategy that provides prospective customers with transparency of their current document output, and proposes a new, more streamlined environ-ment. Ricoh’s office consultants work in partnership with prospective customers to deliver an optimized solution that reduces their TCO and improves their document workflow productivity. The key is to develop a total print management strategy (PMS) that increases their produc-tivity, while lowering their TCO.

In the race to control the managed printing |services space, who will finish first?

Print RunVISHAL AWAL,

Executive Director, Services, Xerox South AsiaRAJIV BHATIA, COO, Ricoh India

n FACE OFF

Ricoh Vs. Xerox

— As told to Radhika Nallayam


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