How CXOs are Learning to Tackle the Challenges of Multiple Clouds

Five years ago, when messaging and voice communication services provider Solutions Infini Inc. moved its entire information technology (IT) infrastructure to the cloud, the company’s executives believed they would save on operational costs. Chief technology officer (CTO) Ashish Agarwal soon realized that such was not the case. Just two years after the company moved to the cloud, he discovered that “the amount of money we were paying to the cloud providers was quite high for us, as we operate on very slim margins”.

This called for remedial action, following which the company decided to invest in a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system and host these machines at independent data centres.

While a converged infrastructure integrates the computing, storage, networking and server virtualization aspects of a data centre, HCI integrates some additional technologies with the help of software. Agarwal chose Nutanix as the HCI vendor. Other companies that offer HCI systems include Dell Technologies Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Oracle Corp.

Agarwal reasoned that, “using the front-end of Nutanix’s HCI solution, which is quite simple, we could replicate or mirror our cloud environment with simple clicks”. Solutions Infini now uses a blend of cloud services and the HCI systems hosted at third-party data centres for its application delivery needs.

Solutions Infini’s example is simply a case in point. The fact is that chief information officers (CIOs), CTOs, and other technology decision makers in India are facing challenges related to dealing with multiple cloud computing facilities of companies such as Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Google Inc.

Industry experts and analysts are of the view that as more investments pour into cloud data centres, which provide computing, storage and other information technology (IT) infrastructure and services on a pay-per-use basis, CIOs will have to learn how to manage what they say is an “increasingly hybrid” set-up.

There are three models under cloud computing: in public cloud, business applications run completely in a third-party data centre; in private cloud, individual companies operate their own data centres; and in hybrid cloud, they use a mix of the two. Research firm Gartner, Inc. estimates that the public cloud services market in India, which stood at $1.35 billion in 2016, will grow to $1.93 billion by 2017 and further to $4.28 billion by the end of 2020.

According to the firm, hybrid cloud solutions are driving overall cloud adoption in India.

“Cloud adoption is growing strongly in the region, albeit from a low base. Enterprises are adopting both cloud-enabled managed hosting and public cloud services, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, typically for different use cases,” said D.D. Mishra, research director, Gartner India. “It is getting increasingly common for enterprises to have multiple cloud environments, often operated and supported separately.”

The main issues faced by companies and CIOs, according to Mishra, include “lack of expertise around key areas of hybrid cloud enablement—virtualization, standardization, automation and instrumentation.”

According to Mishra, there is a “lack of guidance” on the technology prerequisites needed to “fully leverage hybrid cloud capabilities”.

He added that the capabilities required typically involve use of “automation and monitoring tools... to not only detect user-impacting problems, but also proactively identify when the service is degrading”.

The growth of virtualization—one of the building blocks of cloud computing—has also given rise to the phrase “software-defined” (software-defined storage, software-defined networking, even software-defined data centre). Virtualization allows a computer to be split into multiple virtual machines (VMs) for running different applications through the use of a sophisticated software called ‘hypervisor’. Companies that provide hypervisor solutions include VMware Inc., Microsoft, Red Hat, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc. and Nutanix.

“Gradually, it has to be software-defined everything and one operating system (OS) will subsume everything else,” said Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO, Nutanix, in an interview recently.

“You can get rid of a lot of people in the data centre and optimize your costs when software starts to do a lot of things automatically,” he explained.

He added that the concept that everything is an app is “being replicated into the bowels of the data centre”.

The service delivery model in cloud computing has evolved from companies having their own data centres to hosting their servers in outside facilities, to plain-vanilla or bare-metal infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to software-as-a-service (SaaS), according to Sunil Gupta, executive director and president of Netmagic—an NTT Communications Corp. company that operates a number of cloud data centres across India.

Netmagic, according to Gupta, has integrated multiple cloud offerings from different companies into “a unified managed cloud service”. Towards this purpose, it has developed an “orchestration layer or a cloud management platform” internally over the past couple of years. Moving to the cloud, Gupta said, is not a “zero-to-one story”. It is a “gradual, lengthy journey” and CIOs must keep that in mind.

“The challenge for them is how to migrate their applications smoothly to the cloud with zero or negligible downtime. Then, they also have to tackle what is called ‘shadow IT’ wherein departments other than IT purchased certain cloud applications without even informing the CIO,” Gupta cautioned.

CIOs, according to Gupta, are increasingly moving applications to the cloud—not just email and productivity apps that they began with but also critical ones such as payroll and human resource management apps. Hence, they should plan their cloud migration well in advance. And while planning must be done in a comprehensive way—taking into account storage and other infrastructure requirements—execution should be “gradual”.

According to Gupta, IT heads should also invest in skills for cloud computing such as how to configure and manage hypervisors and hire people who have experience in procuring cloud. “One challenge CIOs face is that different cloud computing companies have different parameters and models for pricing cloud resources, so it makes sense to have technically savvy people in the infrastructure procurement or purchase department who can understand the complexities involved,” he explained.

Mishra of Gartner believes that taking a “consultative approach” is often “a good way to go about implementing one’s cloud strategy.”

CIOs should also look at developing or hiring talent in the areas of automation tools, agile development and cognitive domains, he said.

(This article first appeared on www.livemint.com. Image Credit: Pixabay.com)

7 Reasons Why the CIO Job Can NEVER be Automated

(Image: Pixabay.com)

Dear CIOs, I know most you must be sick and tired by now of hearing all kinds of stories about automate this or automate that, AI, machine learning, deep learning, etc., etc.

It is possible that someone might come up with the idea of “Hey, why not automate the CIO’s job itself?” After all, haven’t we all seen too many threats to the CIO role already, even without automation?

So, here are a few semi-serious reasons why you don’t have to worry about the CIO role self-driving itself into an auto-pilot system:

- Because no AI system can mouth words like “silos,” “vendor-neutral” and “scalability” with as much elan as a CIO.

- In all likelihood, it was a CIO who coined the very concept of automation; so the conceived cannot possibly turn against its conceiver (and be successful in their machinations).

- Because you need someone with real, rather than artificial, intelligence to control all those bots out there.

- Think about it: if one were to indeed automate what CIOs do, then who will complain about budgets being tight or “doing more with less”!

- Because if CIOs get a hang of the conspiracy to automate them out of the market, they will reset the code execution time for the automation function to forever (or eternity, whichever happens to be programmed into their software :)

- Because before “they” can automate it (whoever this they refers to), the CIOs would have reinvented their roles as CAOs (rhymes with cows but otherwise of a different temper)—which stands for Chief Automation Officers!

- And if none of the above works, CIOs will convince the automatons to outsource the thinking part to them and save precious battery resources for other artificial work!

IMHO, forget CIO, I personally don’t think bots will truly replace human beings. They might take up the tedious or repetitive work being done by an army of workers, but they are highly unlikely to manage or motivate teams, lead people by example, inspire trust or become an emotional wonder-pack that humans are.

Now, tell me bot do you think?

The CIO Role: Very Much Alive and Rising in Influence

Doubters of the CIO role and function, here’s some bad news for you: a new global survey reveals “an undeniable increase in the influence of the CIO.”

The survey, conducted by Harvey Nash, a leading professional recruitment firm, and consulting major KPMG, notes that more CIOs now report directly to the CEO (34%) than at any time in the past decade. And before I share other insights from the 18th edition of this global survey that received almost 3,400 responses from CIOs and technology leaders across 82 countries, let me pull out a happy tidbit: CIOs with a direct report to the CEO are also the happiest (87% report job fulfillment).

While there could be multiple reasons for this “happiness,” my surmise is that such a direct reporting structure would certainly take away many irritants for technology leaders and untangle them from other CXO/peer “issues.”

Another indicator of the increasing CIO influence is that 57% of CIOs now sit on the executive board or other senior leadership committees (up by 50% over 11 years), as per the survey. (I know it’s a long, relatively slow march, but hey, it’s happening :)

Among other highlights is the fact that one in four CIOs now spend at least one day each week outside their core function of IT. The CEO focus, too, is shifting from projects that save money to those that make money (see graphic).

The survey (titled Harvey Nash/KPMG 2016 CIO Survey) reveals that traditional IT priorities are seeing major shifts over the past four years: increasing operational efficiencies has dropped 16%, and delivering stable IT performance has dropped 27%.

These statistics not only point to the growing influence of the CIO in a company but also that they have more time for top/bottom-line improvement and innovation.

What continues to hold them back, however, is what this media release on the survey terms as “the greatest technology skills shortage since the Great Recession almost a decade ago.”

As many as 65% of CIO respondents say they believe a lack of talent will hinder their organizations’ ability to keep up with the pace of change—which is a 10% rise in the past year alone.

For the second consecutive year, data analytics is the most in-demand skill (39%). A high 89% of CIOs are worried about talent retention. (It’s another matter, perhaps, that there have been ample job movements and career shifts within the CIO community itself: 31% of the CIOs have been in their current role for less than two years and 15% moved job last year.)

The changing talent and CIO career dynamics could also be the result of the growing acceptance and impact of Digital.

One in five organizations now deploys a CDO (no, the CDO is not off the radar, though the initial euphoria on a separate digital officer seems to have come down a bit). More important, 58% of respondents reported that their organization has a clear digital vision and strategy.

In his executive summary for the report, Dr. Jonathan Mitchell, Non-Executive Chair, Global CIO Practice, Harvey Nash (a former CIO of Rolls-Royce and a tech veteran), writes: “There is little doubt that our industry is changing rapidly. In the last two years, IT leaders have become newly invigorated. The days of budget cuts and staff losses are well behind us. New challenges such as ‘digital’ have emerged. Was this yet another technology fad? No, was the resounding response from last year’s respondents. Digital is most definitely real and it is changing the way in which everyone thinks about IT.”

While there are many challenges for CIOs in the disruptive days ahead, let’s hope that the CIO role stays invigorated for many, many years to come.

(Lead image credit: Pixabay.com. This blog post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com.)

Why Cook is the Apple of Privacy Advocates’ Eye

The battle between civil liberty and privacy on the one hand, and the reach of the law enforcement agencies for the (supposed) benefit of public/national security on the other, is taking interesting turns these days, especially in the digital realm. It is happening in the US right now, but something similar could soon reach Indian shores as well.

The case in point is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asking Apple to help it force-access data on the locked iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two perpetrators of last December’s San Bernardino attack in which 14 people were killed (Farook and his accomplice wife were shot dead by the police on the same day; the iPhone in question is in FBI’s possession.) A federal magistrate in California is said to have ordered Apple to write a custom version of the iPhone software that disables key security features and install it on Farook's iPhone in order to foil the encryption, as per a Vox.com report.

Apple has decided to contest the order, citing grave concerns about compromising the security and hence personal data of millions of its customers who trust the iPhone with their sensitive information. In fact CEO Tim Cook has taken the issue to its customers, posting an open letter to them on the Apple website.

“This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake,” writes Cook.

From the way the use of smartphones (not just iPhones but devices based on Android and other OSes) is proliferating around the world, including India, Cook might as well have said “people around the world.” And that is why I chose to post it here on dynamicCIO so that technologists, IT leaders, vendors and other stakeholders in the fast-emerging Indian digital ecosystem could ponder over it and keep their own responses and countermeasures ready when the need arises.

Interestingly, this is happening at a politically charged time here, what with the country in the grips of a fierce debate around freedom of speech, notions of nationalism or anti-nationalism and an allegedly authoritarian regime (which is said to be capable of not only breaching individual privacy—of which there is very little in India in the first place—but also bringing the full force of the machinery at its disposal to undermine any dissenting voices; reminiscent of but not equivalent to the Emergency year).

To return to Apple and FBI, both sides are putting their points across emphatically and logically—even causing a sort of schism in the online community on who is right or wrong in this case.

Says Cook in his letter: “For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.”

Cook is highly concerned, and rightly according to several security experts quoted on the Internet in various reports, that once Apple complies with the FBI request to break the encryption on one iPhone, anyone can use that “backdoor” facility to gain unauthorized access to millions of these devices out there.

The FBI seems to understand this though it’s pressing on with its demand; FBI Director James Comey is said to have responded: “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's pass code without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That's it. We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the land.” [Source: Los Angeles Times article]

It is not fully clear from most reports (at least not to me, a non-expert in encryption) whether it is technically feasible for Apple to create an exception in the case WITHOUT compromising on the general robustness of the iPhone as far as encryption capabilities are concerned.

Not that Apple was not cooperating with the investigating authorities on the San Bernardino case or other government requests of similar nature. According to a New York Times article, enviously headlined (envious for Sundar Pichai, let’s say) “How Tim Cook, in iPhone Battle, Became a Bulwark for Digital Privacy,” Cook has been tediously cooperating with government requests (not just those from the US guv but globally) for unlocking its smartphones.

The Times writes: “Each data-extraction request was carefully vetted by Apple’s lawyers. Of those deemed legitimate, Apple in recent years required that law enforcement officials physically travel with the gadget to the company’s headquarters, where a trusted Apple engineer would work on the phones inside Faraday bags, which block wireless signals, during the process of data extraction.”

Apparently, Cook has been trying to do the fine balancing act of entertaining government requests and keeping its tight grip on the security features of its product intact but—as the latest (still developing) case reveals, a time has come when the envelope on “government overreach” is pushing the boundaries to an unprecedented, treacherous level.

And so the debate rages on.

Do let me know what you make of it.

(Image courtesy: Apple.com. Curiously, I happened to notice that this photo of Tim Cook is uploaded by someone at Apple under the name cook_hero :)

Note: This blog post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com.

Leading Data Scientist Talks about, Well, What Data Scientists Do!

Just as data keeps proliferating all around us, there is a great hue and cry about what to do with all those terabytes, petabytes, exabytes…whatever bytes you! Sure, there are ever powerful number-crunching machines and more capable software, but at the end of the day, you are going to need professionals especially skilled in the science of data analysis, management and insights.

That will be the Data Scientist, a role dubbed by some as the sexiest job of this century. Sexy not necessarily in terms of what all it involves but certainly in the high demand and even higher pay packets.

But what exactly would these data scientists do?

An illuminating blog entry on this very interesting and still intriguing question was posted recently by Bernard Marr, an analytics expert and founder of Advanced Performance Institute. To demystify what the work of a data scientist actually involves, and what sort of person is likely to be successful in the field, Marr spoke to one of the world’s leading data scientists, Dr. Steve Hanks—a doctorate from Yale who has worked with companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

Currently the Chief Data Scientist at Whitepages.com (whose Contact Graph database contains information for over 200 million people and which is searched 2 billion times a month), Dr. Hanks talks about some key attributes of a data scientist: One, they have to understand that data has meaning; Two, they have to understand the problem that they need to solve, and how the data relates to that; and Three, they have to understand the engineering (behind delivering a solution).

While all three of these capabilities are important, writes Marr, it doesn’t mean there’s no room for specialization. He quotes Hanks as saying that it is “virtually impossible to be an expert in all three of those areas, not to mention all the sub-divisions of each of them.” The important thing here is that even if one specializes in one of these areas, one at least has good appreciation of all of them. Further, in Hanks’ words: “Even if you’re primarily an algorithm person or primarily an engineer—if you don’t understand the problem you’re solving and what your data is, you’re going to make bad decisions.”

I can especially identify with the “holistic appreciation” quality of data scientists, as many CIOs and development project heads have often shared similar sentiments about most code writers: they are too narrowly focused on the “problem” at hand and usually miss the big picture about the whole project.

Fortunately, unlike the job of a programmer, the field of data science is attracting or likely to attract people “of different personality types and mindsets.”

Having said that, the main challenge for data scientists is not in specializing in a particular machine learning algorithm or a particular sub-field or tool, but in keeping up with the general speed of development in data science, the blog notes.

For more interesting details and insights, I would urge you to read the full blog post.

Do let me know what you think of the fast-emerging field of Data Science.

(Note: This blog post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com. Image courtesy: Americanis.net)

5 Ways CIOs Can Transform Their Companies into Data-Driven Enterprises

Data, data everywhere—not just the right kind to make effective decisions! It wouldn’t be wrong to assume that this is the common lament in most enterprise decision-making circles today.

On the one hand, companies are drowning in an unprecedented flood of data, structured as well as unstructured. And, on the other, CIOs, CMOs and other CXOs are struggling to get a handle on all that data, put it into the right perspective, extract and massage it into a usable form and take quick, effective decisions. The ones that can earn their firm the much-prized moniker of an agile business or a data-driven enterprise.

While making decisions in any enterprise involves a whole battalion of executives, LOB heads, managers, supervisors and many others, I think the job of enabling the whole organization to take decisions based on analytics rather than hunches (and perhaps, lunches) is most suited to the CIO. The reason is simple: who else has an across-the-board view of the data ecosystem of the company? And that too with the additional knowhow of how the information systems work (or can be made to work)?

So, without further ado, here are five ways CIOs can enable an environment for adaptive, data-led decision making in their organizations:

Making speed count: I know one thing for sure: organizations of all stripes today collect all sorts of data. Through all sorts of forms. By making innumerable number of calls to customers and prospects. And by sources such as the usual enterprise data captured through ERP and other operational systems. But how fast are you with the data you collect? Does it lie buried into file cabinets or dusty disks? Simply putting the data to quick use can make a huge difference to the organization. Following up on a hot lead in quick succession of the data collection process, for instance, will translate into revenue; too much delay, on the other hand, will make the prospect turn to your competitors.

Knowing your data from your metrics: This may sound simple to some and unnecessarily complicated to others. Yet this article on the Harvard Business Review site illustrates the difference and the significance of the difference quite clearly. Authors Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin cite in the article the example of a YouTube video, asking the reader to guess as to how many views would qualify a video as a success. Now, the particular video in question had garnered 1.5 million views but it failed to do what it was supposed to do: encourage young people to donate their used sports goods. So, despite the impressive views, only eight viewers signed up for donation—with zero finally making the donation!

Not all results (or metrics) will turn out to be in such low extremes. But the point is well-made: you need to specify clear metrics in any data collection or numbers related exercise that will reliably give the true measure of success for the initiative.

Data is data is data, right? Wrong: When data is to be put at the heart of decision-making in an enterprise, it matters all the more that the data be accurate, consistent and timely. So, one may be under the impression that all the data required for a project, say, a marketing campaign, is available, if the data quality is not up to the mark, the results of the campaign would certainly be below expectations.

According to a data quality study by Experian Information Solutions, 32% of U.S. organizations believe their data to be inaccurate and further, 91% of respondents believe that revenue is affected by inaccurate data in terms of wasted resources, lost productivity, or wasted marketing and communications spend. If that’s the case with such a data-rich economy, one could imagine how bad the shape of things would be in a country like India, where data collection and research are relatively new fields and far from being mature scientific disciplines. In this context, the need for best practices as well as tech tools in maintaining high data quality cannot be over-emphasized.

Democratization of analytics: How many of you can remember the era of generating sporadic MIS reports for the consumption of the privileged few? Well, that era is long gone. However, most companies are still chary of sharing key statistics or analytics data beyond the confines of top or senior mid-management. But gradually, this state of affairs, too, is set for a bold change. Some call the coming wave as the democratization of data or analytics, in which actionable data percolates to the lowest links in the organizational hierarchy.

Having said that, democratizing data does not mean dropping a huge spreadsheet on everyone’s desk and saying, “good luck,” as Kris Hammond, Chief Scientist at Narrative Science points out in this article. On the contrary, he explains what it involves simply and emphatically: “Democratization requires that we provide people with an easy way to understand the data. It requires sharing information in a form that everyone can read and understand. It requires timely communication about what is happening in a relevant and personal way. It means giving people the stories that are trapped in the data so they can do something with the information.”

Point well made: unless people can take “informative action,” the analytics tools or the extracted data will have little value for the people or the organization.

Analyzed this, have ya? Now visualize that, too: I’m not sure if you noticed but the Internet has been flooded with a new tool of information dissemination in the past couple of years. It’s called the infographic. For most of your searches on Google, there are now an eye-load of infographics, those illustrative diagrams that give you the needed information with icons, pictures, graphs and anything non-text.

Much less noticeable but equally important, a similar movement is underway within enterprises in the context of data analytics. Vendors such as Tableau Software and Qlik Technologies are leading the charge in this emerging segment, referred to as the visual analytics market

According to specialist consulting firm Atheon Analytics, visual analytics “brings together computer science, information visualization, cognitive and perceptual sciences, interactive design, graphic design, and social sciences.” (To see the power of visualized data in action, watch this slightly old but enormously impactful video, the Joy of Stats, of Swedish statistician Hans Rosling, who is often referred to as the “Jedi master of data visualization.”)

The above are only a few of the multiple ways in which CIOs can bring the hidden power of data to the forefront of organizational ability and agility. There are plenty of tools and technologies available but each organization must find its own best-fit path to data-driven success. The key is to start the data journey as early as possible and do so in right earnest.

Internet of Things: Sensors and Sensibilities

Forecast for the future: strong clouds are hovering over the technology landscape, all that big data floating around has started forming data lakes, and people are increasingly going social + mobile. A part of the future has already arrived, although much of it is still buffering like that revolving circle on your smartphone screen (the last one is especially true of bandwidth-challenged countries like India).

If that prognostication sounds complex, try this: everything is getting connected to the Internet. Or it soon will be, as the vendors and analysts constantly tell us. According to a Cisco estimate, 25 billion devices will be connected by the end of this year and 50 billion by 2020.

It is difficult to talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) without also dragging along social media, mobility, (big data) analytics and cloud, the SMAC stack as it’s called.  One thing is built on top of another or something is enabled by something else and so on. Typically, as we have seen in technology, things have been done often in isolation (that brings a pet CIO term/peeve to the mind: silos). And then, they are inevitably pulled together by the inescapable tug of the Net. Lo and behold! You are again struggling to swim in turbulent waters.

I was driving to my new workplace amid the chaotic rains of Delhi earlier this month when my thoughts veered to how IoT can help us navigate the traffic snarls, besides making other aspects of city life easier for consumer-citizens.

The first traffic signal that I stopped at was a familiar scene of free-for-all that city-dwellers in India in general and Delhi in particular have come to witness quite frequently. It happens because of sudden signal failure and people driving through in all directions. In this case, the signal succumbed to some mysterious forces of malfunction—ones that are always in full fury at the first hint of rain or a power outage.

Somehow, I wriggled out of the mess, took a turn and drove further on. And just when I thought the downpour was beginning to thin down to a drizzle, I found that, on the side of the road, there was a burst pipe from which water was gushing out voluminously. This caused some motorists to avoid the “water lane,” with the result that cars and bikes were squeezing into the middle of the road, creating an artificial jam of sorts.

Before I finally reached office after a marathon drive, I witnessed several more stupidities of not living in a smart city. Among them: an ambulance wailing its siren to no avail, for it was stuck in a sea of cars moving at snail’s pace; garbage from the open dump area overflowing and mixing with the rainwater sloshing about on the roads; and street lights that were turned on even in broad daylight.

At this point it would be hard to imagine if driverless Google cars can *ever* navigate the roads of Indian cities. But the following are equally hard *not* to imagine: Why can’t megacities like Delhi have an intelligent, robust traffic management system (one that doesn’t stop working every time it rains or each time the city lights go out)? Why can’t we ensure that medical emergencies do not die a premature death on city roads? Is it not possible to enforce lane driving with the use of sensors/CCTV cameras at least at key points where congestion/violation is highest? How come some roads are tarred again and again while others have crater-size pits that haven’t been filled since ages?

Other common sights visible across Indian cities include water tankers with leaking taps plying on the roads, parking lots that are over-crowded in some places and virtually empty in others, and all types of garbage getting dumped in a single, overstuffed lot.

Chaos rules in public places such as bus and train stations, hospitals and even private, huge supermarkets. People have to wait long hours where no wait should be required. Or they run from one hospital wing to another merely to collect reports. I have seen people abandon shopping carts, which must have taken them hours to fill, when they see the serpentine queues at checkout counters.

It is true that the situation has much to do with over-crowding and the paucity of resources. But a lot is lacking in terms of intelligent governance and larger participation of the private sector in delivering services that can ease the pain of common citizens. In the context of enterprises, the deficiency is in creating a connected service ecosystem that is intelligent and efficient.

Thankfully, we are at a point where appropriate use of technology—sensors, CCTVs, SMAC, etc.—can not only solve a lot of the problems associated with the smooth running of a city but also create huge business opportunities for companies (and hence CIOs) in multiple industries.

For sure, all that talk of Digital India by the Government of India has given everyone hope for betterment. But it is high time we studied and learned from the examples of smart cities across the globe and got down to adapting and implementing those solutions for the Indian environment. The important point here is that things should not happen in isolation—whether a project concerns different government departments or a public-private partnership (PPP) model. Done in isolation, things often go haywire and the envisaged impact is lost.

Barcelona is often cited as one of the most shining examples of smart cities, where IoT is not a distant concept but a living reality. The most significant aspect of the city’s smart strategy, in my opinion, is the fact that it takes a comprehensive view of the various projects being developed or the services being maintained throughout the city.

A holistic approach has enabled Barcelona to boast of a system of underground service galleries that enables repair/improvement of services such as power supply and waste collection without the need for excavation; Tap & Go contactless card payment system (using NFC or near field communication technology); sensor-based intelligent street lighting (with measures such as regulated hours of lighting and electrical analysis of the position of lamps rendering 40% in cost savings); a smart service delivery platform for citizens and municipal workers, which has a common data warehouse where the different sensor systems store their information (built through a PPP model); and an integrated waste management plant. Besides these, several other projects have been completed or are under way to make the city sustainable, competitive, smart and, most important, worth living.

Among other cities that are touted as leading examples of smart cities are Copenhagen, London, Helsinki, Seoul, Montreal, Chicago and Singapore (not in any particular order). India can look at any or all of them to work out its own IoT and smart cities plan.

Most of the cities that are doing well as smart cities are not shying away from the latest in IoT and SMAC technologies and putting them to optimum use, especially in partnership with private businesses and entrepreneurs.

In India, the intent of the government and business biggies seems to be in favor of IoT/smart cities. Now, all that is required is a lot of action on the ground so that smooth order can replace random chaos—in some Indian cities at least.

(Note: This blog post first appeared on DynamicCIO.com.)

5 Things CIOs should Probably Know about the Internet of Things

In the past few months CIOs would have been bombarded with headlines along these lines: Internet of Things will disrupt how business will be done in 10 years; So and So says IoT is a gazillion dollar opportunity; IoT will cause new security headaches for IT managers...etc, etc, etc.

The headlines would, of course, have been followed by futuristic scenarios (some beneficial and some alarmist), details on offerings and products, and other nitty-gritty of what makes IoT so, ahem, different.

And as is likely in such cases of continuous media strafing, people tend to think of the technology either as mere hype or too futuristic or, if I may say, too banal.

But sometimes, when the technology is as all-encompassing as cloud computing or IoT, entire industries, not to speak of companies, can undergo cathartic changes. So let us take a peek at some of the key things CIOs, business decision makers and tech professionals should know about IoT:

The name of the beast: First things first. This much is clear: the idea behind IoT is to get more and more devices, including items of everyday use other than PCs or mobiles, connected to the Internet in order to bring more and more intelligence into the system. So, who coined the term “IoT” and is it the only one to depict that idea?

When I asked Google about it (I didn’t ask Page or Brin but typed in my query, of course), it told me this: “Kevin Ashton supposedly coined the phrase “Internet of Things” while working for Procter & Gamble in 1999.” This puzzled me. See, this information appeared in Google’s own box that comes on top of all other search results, including Wikipedia. I checked Wikipedia, too, and it confirmed the name of the P&G guy. So let’s give the credit to Ashton (though I’m still uncomfortable why Google was unsure and played safe with “supposedly coined”; if Google doesn’t know something for sure, who does? )

As to the terminology, IoT is not the only term and there are other contenders—including Internet of Everything, Internet of Anything and Industry 4.0 (reminds you of Web 2.0, Web 3.0, etc, doesn’t it?) From what I gathered, IoT is by far the most used term, so I’m sticking with it. (There’s another term, M2M, which is considered as the precursor to IoT by many in the industry; while some people quote a few technical differences between the two, it seems M2M is more or less being subsumed or replaced by IoT.)

The scope of IoT is, like, huge: From changing whole business models and impacting supply chains to creating a new environment for how consumers live and how the ever-smarter cities make use of all that embedded intelligence, the scope of IoT is limited only by human imagination.

If you look at the projections for the number of devices to be connected to the Net or the estimated revenue impact from IoT, humongous is the word. While research firm Gartner says the number of connected devices will grow from less than a billion in 2009 to 26 billion units in 2020, estimates from Cisco suggest that 25 billion devices will be connected by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020 (Gartner excludes PCs, tablets and mobile phones from its tally whereas Cisco’s figures include all types of devices). There are projections from other firms as well. Irrespective of whose data you look at, the numbers are much bigger than the entire population of the planet.

Further, a Gartner report says that “economic value-add (which represents the aggregate benefits that businesses derive through the sale and usage of IoT technology) is forecast to be $1.9 trillion across sectors in 2020.” To put that number in perspective, the entire spending on IT and telecom worldwide is estimated to be $3.8 trillion in 2015 as per IDC.

A matter of industries and degrees: As the hype phase continues, no one is denying the overall big-ticket impact of IoT. However, it has been conjectured that the impact will differ in degrees and that certain industry segments will be affected much more than others. According to Gartner, these verticals are leading the adoption of IoT: manufacturing, healthcare and insurance.

But adoption will also depend on which new “things” come up in the market for connectedness and which other segments or companies drive innovation through their own use-cases.

The challenges en route: The direction IoT will take is being set each moment and each day, as vendors (especially biggies like IBM, Intel, Cisco, Google and Qualcomm, among others) continue to jockey for pole position in the market for IoT components, gear or services. One of the major challenges is equipping existing devices with a chip intelligent enough to be powerful and useful yet cheap enough to be commercially successful on scale. Another is the high failure rate of start-ups that come up with new “things,” connected hardware such as smart meters, wearable devices, health monitors, etc. The reasons for failure could range from high cost of development (and hence the device), lack of consumer interest, or just being too ahead of the market.

Companies may also be wary of embracing IoT due to additional liabilities or issues (privacy, legal tangles) engendered by the customer data captured, stored or monitored through IoT devices.

And then, the existence of multiple standards for wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, among others) will likely continue to be a headache. Pointing to the fragmentation in connectivity, Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm's interactive platforms unit said in a recent article on WSJ.com: “It's not that things aren't getting connected—they are getting connected badly.” (In another context, his remark would gel with those who know how Internet generally works in India.)

Management and security hassles: CIOs and other decision makers will have barely eased their BYOD pain when they would be facing the much larger prospect of handling multiple “things” across the length and breadth of the company. On their part, solution providers are working towards filling the gaps in IoT security. For instance, ARM Holdings recently acquired a Dutch firm Offspark to include the latter’s PolarSSL, an IoT security layer for across-the-devices usage, into its mbed IoT development platform. McAfee, owned by Intel, enhanced its security management for Intel IoT gateways. There’s much happening by way of streamlining security for the upcoming IoT world.

Having said that, information security is already a highly complex and daunting task for most organizations—and the complexities and challenges are only going to multiply when more data flows through more devices, often in real or near-real time.

All in all, developments in IoT will be quite interesting for CIOs and decision makers to watch and ready their own organizations for solutions or services relevant to their business.

For instance, the BFSI sector would continue to innovate around micropayments, contactless or virtual cards (that might be apps or embedded into a wearable); healthcare providers would keep coming up with new gadgets and services to remotely monitor health parameters and administer medicine/advice; connected sensors will make better sense of energy use in smart buildings or cities—and yes, more and more fridges will order milk from the supermarket on their own.

Mobile Device Mess?

The Bring Your Own Device genie is out, causing multiple headaches for IT professionals. Thankfully, applying MDM (Mobile Device Management) can bring some relief

One man's food is another's poison, they say. Applying this old adage to enterprise mobility, while the proliferation of devices comes as a boon to the touch-happy users, it is often seen as anathema to the enterprise tech professionals.

I can almost imagine their nightmares as streams of young new recruits (and young-at-heart bosses) enter the office premises, playing games, chatting, Facebooking, and occasionally answering emails or opening work files—all on their swishy new smartphones and tablets.

The tribe of mobile devices in our midst is growing phenomenally. Each quarter close to 150 million smartphones are sold worldwide and about three million in India. And these numbers are growing pretty fast.

It is inevitable that employees will walk in with their own mobile devices—and insist on using them for work as well.

Thankfully, MDM or mobile device management tools are now at hand. Using these tools, IT professionals can minimize their nightmares, if not completely eliminate them.

The problem with mobile devices is that there are just too many of them! CIOs and IT managers have to deal with a wide variety of OS types, software versions and hardware models. It's not easy taming what's come to be known as the BYOD (bring your own device) phenom, and no one seems to have found the formula to perfectly match the best interests of the company and its employees.

MDM tools such as those from MobileIron, AirWatch and Zenprise (there are scores of solutions available, including many from traditional large vendors, though only a few are available in India at the moment) allow enterprises to provision applications with ease and safely manage access to critical business data.

However, challenges persist. Key concerns include creating a standard environment, rendering apps correctly or elegantly on multiple types of devices, and dealing with the constant barrage of new apps that employees would want to download and use. And then, there are issues concerning company policies (subsidizing the costs, fixing liabilities in case of theft, etc.) and employee turnover (managing the data/device handover process).

Together with cloud and social media, mobile devices and their growing use for work are causing a complete relook of ICT infrastructure for many enterprises. Deployment of a solution is no longer a siloed activity that can be done on a need basis but one that is getting intertwined with other solutions, the overall infrastructure and, of course, the company's “agility” ambitions.

A lot of learning and pain awaits IT folks before the device mess can be sorted out to any desirable degree of satisfaction.

But then, what's life without challenges?