Today there is no such thing as a business initiative without a technology foundation. Enterprises across industries are aligning the IT and business functions more closely than ever, says Vivekanand Venugopal, vice-president & general manager, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). The Japanese firm has unveiled a new approach called Business Defined IT, which addresses today?s business climate?the expanding mobility of apps, data and devices, new IT economics driven by mobility, self-service and cloud adoption and the opportunity for businesses to harness the power of data analytics to deliver business insight and competitive advantage. In a recent interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary, Venugopal says that businesses in India are more knowledgeable about technology and are being more proactive. Excerpts:
Everybody is talking about social media, mobility, analytics and cloud these days. Are the IT managers in sync with this reality?
Yes. They have no other options available because these are technology capabilities capable of helping them drive new business. If you look at it, mobility came at it a lot faster than the other technologies. Mobility is their way of collaborating. Cloud was primarily to drive flexibility, and not to drive cost actually. And, the third one is if you really look at it from the point of analytics, it became very clear that if they have to monetise their existing data, then they have to apply analytics and also look at some form of predictability into the uncertain future; so they need analytics to get into that insight.
If you look at social media, it has become another imperative for them to retain their customers and identify what their real requirements are as opposed to traditional approaches, which were long drawn. Now they are having instant feedback about the products, and social media is becoming the primary vehicle for that.
Don?t you think technology today must be defined by business?not by software or anything else?
Agreed. This is a thought process that has never translated into a strategy, but has now become a part of our launch recently?we call it the business defined IT. The traditional approach of most of the CIOs is what we call the conventional IT. It typically takes a different view?they would apply the business goals to the technologies that are already there in the data centres. That?s why the success rate is very low. But when you have the business dictate to organisations, these are the technologies required to obtain those business outcomes, then the success rates are very high and we call them?IT accelerated business.
Cloud is increasing in India. Is it also increasing in the government sector?
Yes, and it is happening in the majority areas. If you look at the majority of the initiatives today, a classic example would be the National Informatics Centre. Looking at the automation of the various government initiatives, they are all being deployed in a private cloud. The adaptability required to ensure that when you launch a government service, the outcome in terms of adoption is pretty low. You don?t want to put a huge amount of infrastructure out there. But after it gets socialised, the adoption rate goes up. That?s where the cloud really starts to become really critical.
What, according to you, are the drivers for the adoption of cloud computing in India?
There are two thought processes in that. The first one where organisations have failed is where they have looked at it in terms of adoption of cloud because it is cheap. People who took that approach are the ones who haven?t adopted cloud successfully in terms of sustaining the adoption, because they have realised that the cloud is not the cheapest. It showcases inherent costs which are not very clearly visible when you are embarking on that journey.
Then there are organisations who have said let me derive flexibility in terms of how do I now rapidly tie into business outcome and say as to achieve that business outcome, I need to publicly deploy an application and that we call is business velocity. Once that is done, then they are very successful because they are looking at flexibility and agility, our key matrix, and then once they start to adapt that application, then the other foundational IT which in infrastructure, IT, networking is the consumption, all forms imply. So I would say that has gained a lot of importance today.
You are talking about continuous cloud infrastructure. What is the Hitachi strategy and innovation around this?
This has come out of discussions in the last 12 months. Global uncertainty put a lot of stress on organisations and that stress was manifested in terms of customers. You should be in a position to adapt and win in today?s information economy. The second imperative is that there is uncertainty in the future. So if you look at these two key requirements, you always need to have an infrastructure that is adaptable, always automated and flexible.
We call it the continuous cloud infrastructure and the first thing we announced was the world?s first global storage virtualisation operating system. If you look at customers today, they go through various cycles. They buy a technology and after three years, they might buy a new technology. They unlearn what they did three year ago, and re-learn what they did based on their infrastructure and that?s not cost effective. So what we said was we?ll give you global storage virtualisation OS.
What is the technology differentiator that Hitachi brings to the table?
The first thing is the platform and solutions that enterprise IT customers consume in the private cloud ?it is the same platform and solutions that is deployed for customers in the public cloud. Our strategy is you should be equipped to adopt cloud computing at your own pace because it is a journey. For that, you require a continuous cloud infrastructure.
Second is you should be able to facilitate all types of data ? cloud needs to be independent of the media, infrastructure and application. The third thing is when customers take a decision to move from a private cloud to public cloud, they should have the flexibility to have information exchange that is not there today. If you say you are going to adopt an emergent cloud, you go there, you get in and never come out. But with our Hitachi cloud, you have a very significant protocol called Rest API called?the APIs which facilitate information exchange.
What is the importance of the Indian market to Hitachi?
If you look at Hitachi Data Systems, we have a very clear understanding within Hitachi that India is one of the fastest growing markets and they have demonstrated that by the eight decades of their existence in India. So, that?s very profound in terms of the demonstration that India is important. The second thing which we have done is HDS is now integrated with the Hitachi Information Platform division and it is called the global information systems group. Now you have the HDS globalisation of Hitachi IT platform and solutions in line. With that if you take the Indian market, we have the R&D centre in India, we have the software facilities and engineering facilities in India. These entities will only grow along with the Hitachi strategy.
From an HDS point, in the last three years, India has been recognised as the fastest growing region among BRIC countries and we see the next five years to be great years for us given the fact that it will a new government. We expect it to be stable and we hope to see a lot of government investments in terms of domestic consumption and that?s where our solutions become important where we help them rapidly drive growth for them.
