IT “VERY STRATEGICALLY IMPORTANT” TO THE BUSINESS:

Today’s challenging and hyper-competitive business environment offers CIOs a unique opportunity to assume an expanded role as a strategic technology expert collaborating with the business toward greater success, more revenue and happier customers.

It’s in IT’s hands at the moment, but the window of opportunity is closing as lines of business get tech-savvy, spending more of their budgets on IT projects and re-examining the role that IT plays in advising them. IT can either define a new role for itself which embraces this change, or ignore it and risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to the business.

The survey of 1,300 senior IT leaders worldwide revealed 39% of respondents now see IT as a service broker or consultant to the line of business rather than a full-service provider of all IT services; and 35% of IT spending is occurring outside of the IT department today—and that number is expected to grow to 44% in three years. Other disturbing findings show that just 11% see the role of IT as a developer of new, innovative services and only 14% consider IT as a driver of new business initiatives.

IT should want more than to be the keeper of others’ IT investments, on call to fix problems as they arise. IT leaders should use their knowledge, experience and technology expertise to guide the business toward opportunities that otherwise would not exist if not for IT’s innovation.

There has been some progress for IT, with more than 40% in 2013 (versus 35% in 2011) identifying IT as “very strategically important” to the business, but more must be done to solidify IT as the strategic technology leader within the business. The opportunity is now, and this research report will help IT leaders, including CIOs:

• Understand how their role is changing and how to plan for the future;

• Assess how the organization views IT and its contributions to the business;

• Set strategies for the investments required to re-position the role of IT;

• Use technology to measure, quantify and report on the value IT provides to the business;

• Provide guidance on disruptive technologies to drive competitive advantage;

• Evolve their position from IT support to technology strategist.

We’ll help you verify the functionality of standardized interfaces and identify what you need to do to get your multi-vendor network in the best possible shape. We help consolidate, transform and evolve your service delivery platforms into a strong asset that lets you grow, reduce operating expenditures and offer new end-user services.

For more details visit us @www.urssystems.com

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The Role of IT is Indeed Changing: IT needs to be the key advisor as technology becomes the business

Indian IT leaders expect to invest 65% of their IT budget in delivering new services, the highest in the world. As software-driven business transformation becomes the norm, and businesses use new applications to engage their employees and customers, this trend is expected to continue, and accelerate, in the years to come. With the focus on innovation, 71% of India Inc’s top management considers IT to be fundamental to the organization’s success or very strategically important, compared to 51% in the United States.

What IT should be doing Now?

Managing the changing role of IT isn’t about control; it’s more about embracing what could become of today’s technology experts and how they can evolve into strategic business partners.

Drive better engagement with business stakeholders: IT needs to define strategic initiatives in the  context of business goals and communicate performance against strategic metrics so the business can understand IT’s value. IT should move beyond internally-focused metrics to external business metrics such as revenue and customer satisfaction, and routinely measure and report on key performance metrics in the language the business will understand.

Gain business support for the IT organization: Now that more CIOs are reporting directly to their CEOs they have the opportunity to become an equal, strategic partner who delivers clear value to the business and in return garners the budget and support needed to implement the strategy.

Build trust with the business by increasing transparency into investments and priorities: Help the business understand how you can optimize resource utilization and spend across internal and cloud service providers, make sourcing decisions based on a true understanding of cost and value and minimize budget variance and schedule uncertainty.

Identify the key roles that drive innovation and invest accordingly: IT organizations will always have to maintain existing technology investments and support end-user needs, but that shouldn’t be the primary role going forward. Search for the IT rock stars in the organization, give them time and resources to deliver new products and services, and truly innovate. As you shift more of your energy and focus to new services, over time your budget balance will shift from maintenance to innovation.

Educate the business on disruptive trends: IT organizations should understand how new technologies can drive business success. Stay on top of the latest technologies and invest in the required skills, talent and training. Don’t wait to be asked by the business about cloud computing, Big Data or mobility, for instance; look for ways to collaborate with the business in developing a proactive plan to leverage them.

Evolve IT from support to strategist: Today IT is the “problem fixer”; IT is the go-to for customer complaints; and IT maintains systems. But tomorrow IT needs to be the strategy expert. IT needs to be the key advisor as technology becomes the business.

For more details visit us @www.urssystems.com

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Four sourcing strategies from automakers, companies will be better able to foster innovation and efficiency in their IT outsourcing

As many companies have discovered, much to their dismay, IT outsourcing doesn't always go as planned. In case after case, the lower costs, better service quality, and greater agility everyone was expecting turn out to be elusive. Looking for lessons in failed engagements has become a virtual pastime for the IT sector, yet the disappointments continue. Perhaps it is time to draw insights on outsourcing from another sector -- specifically from one that does a better job of it, the automotive industry.

By following four sourcing strategies from automakers, companies will be better able to foster innovation and efficiency in their IT outsourcing. Just as important, it will spur companies to manage IT as a core component of their business. 

1. Retain expertise: Rebuilding IT expertise will take time, so companies should get on their way. They can decide if any outsourced services could be taken back in-house, and add technical experts to their procurement teams. They can prioritize emerging key technologies, such as virtualization and the cloud, and gradually build skills by hiring or developing the necessary talent. Finally, sourcing and vendor management must become integrated parts of an IT career path and not treated as an end station, as is sometimes the case.

2. Pay attention to processes that provide an edge: In IT, all outsourced processes -- whether a "differentiator" or a more commoditized task -- tend to be handled in the similar, hands-off fashion, with the company relying on the vendor to get things right. The automotive industry approach would let companies' in-house IT teams focus their efforts where the payoff would be greatest. For instance, at a logistics company, one differentiating process might be the routing of trucks. The IT application that supports that routing should be flagged for special treatment, such as stepped-up collaboration or supervision. For here, improvements aren't just beneficial, they can bring competitive advantage. 

3. Challenge suppliers to deliver improvements: In many engagements, ambiguous contracts, hands-off management, and difficulty switching providers (or a reluctance to do so) give vendors little reason to focus on improvements. To get closer to the automobile model, IT organizations should move to standardized environments when possible, particularly in the cloud. They should also consider the "champion-challenger" model, where one provider does the bulk of the work, but another does some of it (and can step in further if necessary). Another approach is to assign one provider the execution of a task, but give another a quality control role, making sure the work gets done. 

4. Emphasize transparency: IT organizations, which typically pay for services on a volume-centric measure -- be it MIPS, terabytes, or number of transactions -- rarely have such an inside view. To gain such a view, they could devote procurement staff to better understanding costs, as well as promote more dialogue and information sharing with providers. As procurement staff members develop more expertise, they'll be better able to evaluate the pricing and quality of the services they are sourcing.

There is a reason IT organizations embrace outsourcing: It can really deliver benefits. But to see them, companies need to get back in the driver's seat, creating the right incentives, and balance, in their sourcing relationships. By embracing these four lessons from the auto industry, they can do just that -- and enjoy a smoother road ahead.

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Building the talent pool for Big Data and analytics requires a blend of mass and customised approach. The mass training and orientation should be planned at high school and undergraduate levels.

Is Our Education System Gearing Up For the Big Data Boom?

The explosion of Big Data and the impact it has created on the businesses—big or small has rattled every one resulting in awe and amazement in some quarters and uncertainty and realisation of lack of readiness in some others. Whatever may be the nature of current response and readiness, one thing everyone is agreed upon is the inevitability of having to build capabilities to embrace this new phenomenon and take advantage of it rather than getting left behind.

According to IDC estimates the size of the ‘digital universe’ was around 130 exabytes about ten years back, which grew to 1,227 exabytes by 2010 and by 2015 it is expected to become 7,910 exabytes. What is unique about this data growth is that more than 90% of the data has got created in just last two years. With more and more sophisticated tools and methods being made available to extract as well as analyse data from customer interactions, emails, web browsing, social networks and machine sensors and a variety of new device options continuing to be made available enabling more and more web transactions, the data deluge is expected to impact every aspect of the economy. No business or for that matter even not for profit businesses can ignore the significance of Big Data. However, there is a yawning gap in terms of capabilities that businesses possess to take full advantage of the opportunities emanating from their web presence.

While intuition will always play an important role in decision making, ignoring data that could be tapped and made use of would lead to sub optimal decision making. This approach has to be inculcated with employees across the board. This leads us to the question of how is our education system getting geared to produce talent which is equipped with skills to think and act around the use of Big Data.

Building the talent pool for Big Data and analytics requires a blend of mass and customised approach. The mass training and orientation should be planned at high school and undergraduate levels. Customised or advanced techniques and curriculum could be introduced as part of the post graduate studies. Hence interventions should be planned in select schools, develop the proof of concept and train the teachers to tune their minds to the eventual areas where their students are expected to be contributing.

Once the system is ready to take off, it may also be worthwhile to consider setting up special schools for high school education with the objective of nurturing multi-disciplinary approach to teaching and lay a strong foundation for exploring the new frontiers of computing power leading to careers in research, applications and product development. The pre-eminence of the Indian businesses in the global knowledge services driven by Big Data and analytics is possible to be realised when we are able to create entry barriers for other countries and therefore we need innovation and the will power to have a radically different approach to education, skilling and talent pool development.

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Transforming Business Performance: As important as the network is, the applications running atop that network are even more important

Businesses are rapidly adopting virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications broadly across the enterprise to minimize costs and enable seamless collaboration and communication. This is significantly straining the traditional network paradigm. IT organizations globally are faced with the challenge to transform network architectures to deliver the right performance and reliability cost-effectively while retaining control.

Market forces driving change include:

• Decreasing cost and increasing reliability of Internet infrastructure 

• Growing diversity of applications, data, and devices across all networks

• Accelerated adoption of private and public cloud computing infrastructure

In a world combining public and private resources, the network itself needs to get hybrid, combining the strengths of the highly reliable Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks with the ubiquity and lower cost of Internet infrastructure. However, change towards more complex network architectures requires planning.

Top 3 IT considerations:

• Identify and Prioritize Applications: Identify, prioritize, and optimize applications to deliver the best performance. Understand application criticality by business, usage patterns and trends, and bandwidth consumption. Understand the current network delivery path and define the optimal delivery path in a Hybrid Network architecture — whether the internal Ethernet network, the wide- area MPLS network, a virtual private network or a hybrid cloud network.

• Define and Establish SLAs for Users and Businesses: Collaborate with line of business owners to identify, define, and establish right application-level Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure the right performance, reliability, and disaster recovery required for the target end users and business processes. This will influence network policies, network architecture design, and network capacity planning in relation to the cost.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Performance Management: Implement new or augment existing tools to gain application level and network visibility for real time performance monitoring to aid in troubleshooting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

In aggregate, the network is more complex than ever before with the addition of hybrid networks that

incorporate the public Internet infrastructure as a way to scale corporate bandwidth cost-effectively. Supporting this architectural transformation requires IT to not only adopt new capabilities but to also

re-evaluate the existing infrastructure design, deployment, and management to maximize the utilization of hybrid resources. This perspective focuses primarily on the results of the technology like performance, reliability, and user productivity. As important as the network is, even more important are the applications running atop that network.

URS Systems also helps IT analyze the enterprise ecosystem across all network links and applications, whether extending to cloud systems or branch offices. It can analyze the most important applications affecting users and IT, from Microsoft productivity applications to accelerating applications in virtualized data centers running on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

For more visit us @www.urssystems.com

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Business Excellence, Innovation is necessary and there is no Innovation without risk.

BI has been one of the most important business initiatives providing positive impact on the health of organizations. Usually, questions are raised on the maturity of the BI initiative and the technology backbone to yield business benefits. And after getting the desired benefits from the BI initiative, the obvious question has been “What next?”.

For more than two decades, organizations have been leveraging Business Intelligence (BI) platforms with the sole objective of ‘management by facts’ for business benefits. Traditionally, BI platforms have been spanning across Information Integration (e.g. ETL, EAI/ESB, CDC), Information Storage (e.g. Data Warehouse, Cubes, Metadata) and Information Analytics (e.g. Enterprise Reports, OLAP Reports, Dashboards and Data Mining) components. Over this period, the landscape of BI has changed with the touch of business integration and innovation. And this change is not just limited to the corporate world.

In the current dynamic market, the rate of change is faster than yesterday and what we do today may not be relevant tomorrow. E.g. change in the landline tariff didn’t happen for more than a decade, but mobile tariff and service plans are changing on an almost quarterly basis. To survive and grow in the vibrant market space, every organization is facing outrageous competition, business convergence, demand for profitable growth and intense pressure on cost. Organizations are becoming innovative in their approach to make business truly performance driven at Strategic, Tactical as well as Operational levels.

For business excellence, innovation is necessary and there is no innovation without risk. Hence for better performance, it is necessary to minimize the area outside the area under control i.e. the Risk Area. Precision in predicting risk (e.g. credit risk, market risk, operational risk) with BI provides the advantage of having more Capital available for operations as well as innovation e.g. Regulatory Authorities relax the Cash Reserve requirement, if predictions in Risk Management are consistently well under the threshold.

In spite of availability of advanced BI technologies in the market, most companies are still struggling to get the BI foundation right i.e. to set up an Enterprise Data Warehouse and governance and get reports and dashboards. Once the right foundation is set for BI, adoption of the new technologies and the path towards  institutionalization of innovation can be laid out. In the vibrant market space, the BI Program can provide a path to Certainty in Experience, while continuing the journey towards perfection. We always need to remember that it is a journey and not a destination!

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How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Costs

Business executives are challenging their IT staffs to convert data centers from cost centers into producers of business value. Data centers can make a significant impact to the bottom line by enabling the business to respond more quickly to market demands. This paper demonstrates, through a series of examples, how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software tools can simplify operational processes, cut costs, and speed up information delivery.

According to the Uptime Institute (a division of the 451 Group) the market for data center infrastructure management systems will grow from $500 Million in 2010 to $7.5 Billion by 2020. IT and business executives have realized that hundreds of thousands of dollars in
energy and operational costs can be saved by improved physical infrastructure planning, by minor system reconfiguration, and by small process changes. The systems which allow management to leverage these savings consist of modern data center physical infrastructure (i.e., power and cooling) management software tools. Legacy reporting systems, designed to support traditional data centers, are no longer adequate for new “agile” data centers that need to manage constant capacity changes and dynamic loads.

Some data center operators do not use any physical infrastructure management tools. This can be risky. One operator who only managed 15 racks at a small manufacturing firm, for example, felt that the data center operations “tribal knowledge” he had acquired over the years could help him handle any threatening situation. However, over time, his 15 racks became much denser. His energy bills went up and his cooling and power systems drifted out of balance. At one point, when he added a new server, he overloaded a branch circuit
and took down an entire rack.

New management software Planning & Implementation tools improve IT room allocation of power and cooling (planning), provide rapid impact analysis when a portion of the IT room fails (operations), and leverage historical data to improve future IT room performance
(analysis). These three types of Planning & Implementation tools–planning, operations, and analysis–are each explained in the following sections this paper. Data center facility software tools (e.g., building management systems) are not discussed.

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Platforms can fundamentally change the way Banks perform key functions

Platforms are pretty buzzy. The term is all over banking and technology, especially for core back office functions in risk and finance. Nearly every Tom, Dick, and Susie in vendor space uses the term “platform.”

But not all platforms are created equal, and some don’t even qualify as such. This isn’t just semantics; this definition matters. Platforms have powerful features that allow financial institutions to do things better, faster, and cheaper than ever before; the latest generation takes it to another level.

1. Adaptability is crucial in risk and finance applications. There have been a myriad of new demands over the past decade, and most financial institutions have struggled to keep up.

2. A real platform changes the eternal buy versus build question to “buy and build.” Yes, there’s an embedded assumption in this that financial institutions don’t build platforms. There are always exceptions, but in general the pressures facing internal IT departments are simply too great for them to build a real platform. 

3. A platform is built of components that allow for the creation of higher order software services that can be reused for different things across the enterprise. Rule engines, cashflow engines, workflow processing tools, and so on come together in a way that allows for customization as a core design principle. 

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Role of IT in building SMART CITY in India:

Information and communication technologies will be deeply embedded in the fabric of both old and new cities and will change the way we think of city operations and how we live and work in these environments. One way to fast track planning and construction of such smart cities is to include the private sector in India within a given framework for such new townships by the government. This would need to be specific to the creation of such smart cities in designated areas, so that existing and outdated laws do not become a barrier. These activities would need to be undertaken by approved consortia (consisting of experts in smart city planning/consulting groups/infrastructure and urban developers/IT experts), which would assist in conceptualizing, designing world class smart city clusters.

Creation of such new satellite cities need to be closely tied to the concepts of sustainability. This requires these new cities to be “smart,” i.e. creating new types of transport systems to avoid congestion that is currently so rampant in many Asian towns, construction using low energy housing materials, newer water harvesting techniques and extensive use of IT systems on cloud in running various urban functions and the provision of e-government services to its citizens. Moreover, such cities should be self-sufficient in being able to create gainful employment for residents so that cross city travel is minimized.

India is expected to see massive urbanization along the same lines of what we have seen in China, where urbanization crossed 50% last year and is projected to cross 75% in the next 5 years.

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India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for Cloud Services:

Current Analysis has released its study titled “Enterprise ICT Investment Insights Study 2014” which indicates that cloud computing is the top priority among Indian enterprises. According to the study, a significant 68 per cent of enterprises in India, with 100-plus employees, are using cloud-based services, while the remaining 32 per cent plan to do so over the next 24 months. This is in line with trends in the larger Asia-Pacific market, where the adoption of cloud-based services is as high as 65 per cent. This study spans 19 countries across four key regions.

The study also finds that the scale of cloud services adoption easily surpasses those of other new-generation ICT services, including Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. While 39 per cent of the respondents ranked Cloud as their top investment priority in India, 16 per cent said it would be Big Data while 12 per cent favoured Enterprise Mobility. Network Security jointly ranked as second highest investment priority, along with Big Data.

“India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for cloud services, led thus far by the private cloud segment. “It is highly notable that cloud has emerged as a leading investment priority for Indian enterprises, surpassing even Network Security investments. However, this certainly doesn’t amount to the ICT decision makers lowering their guards when it comes to the all-vital area of IT security.

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Design Once, Deploy Everywhere: Mobile First, It’s time to rethink things

Today's platform developers plan for mobile enterprise applications with the highest levels of security and access control. Soon the enterprise's issue of mobile security will become moot.

In August, a survey by Software Advice showed that only 39 percent of employees work under a “bring your own device” (BYOD) policy for mobile technology in the workplace. More surprisingly, 20% didn't even know whether there was such a policy in their organizations. That means, when it comes to enterprise mobility, employees either are making up their own rules, or just not following any.

At this point, some information security specialists are probably clutching their heads, wondering what these statistics mean for workplace data security in the mobile world. They can breathe easy. Application development technology is getting to the point where businesses simply shouldn’t have to worry about mobile security issues, and can instead focus on driving new business value from mobile channels.

BYOD policies for security and engagement are becoming a thing of the past – as long as forward-thinking companies take a device-agnostic cloud-based approach to enterprise application development.

A new concept -- the enterprise application platform -- will help revolutionize software delivery on the desktop and on mobile devices in the next few years.   An application platform enables the creation of sophisticated and modern custom applications by putting at the developer’s disposal a set of powerful construction tools that are pre-designed for mobile security.

There is so much more to the mobile business environment than instant messages and email. Consequently, more IT departments are starting to think about business value and how their enterprise applications work on mobile devices.

In most cases, the conclusion they've drawn is that enterprise applications are too complex to be rendered on mobile devices. A mobile front end alone is not sufficient (the thinking goes); the entire application likely must be rewritten for the mobile world. But building new applications for each device is a costly proposition.

It’s time to rethink things.

Visit www.urssystems.com for more details

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INVENTION IS HAPPENING, BUT ACTUALLY QUITE FAST

When things are getting interesting and moving as fast as they are in the communications world, it is easy to get ahead of yourself. Sometimes you seem to go round in circles. It is advisable, if this happens, not to meet yourself coming the other way. 

We are definitely still at the stage of selling ‘data’ but we are beginning to make this cloudy concept clearer. We are selling speed, because speed delivers value to make certain bandwidth hungry applications work properly. And we are selling Voice 2.o in order to fight back against OTT voice players. Confusion is easy to catch amongst the wealth of services now being offered by operators around the world.

A simple ‘Top Ten’ LTE services from operators around the world, it takes us on a concise but interesting journey from speed, through shared plans to sponsored data and beyond. It is interesting to compare what operators in different regions are doing, both within their own region and beyond.

You can sell speed in different ways of course. Once you have customers who have run up to their data limits – a reasonably common occurrence as we know – you can offer to restore their speed and give them more data for a few days, thus selling them a service and solving a problem for the customer.

The majority of operators will be launching Voice over LTE in the next two years. This demands guaranteed quality, and policy management and real time charging can manage this. What it also means, apart from offering customers ‘free’ high quality voice, is that expensive legacy networks and systems can be ‘recycled’ and therefore costs can be cut.

‘Beyond’ sponsored data, some operators are now collaborating with OTT players and this trend will mature and become commonplace in the next two to three years. Offering access to applications such as Facebook and other content partners for free means the partner gets access to the operator’s customers and the operators gets a deal for his. Once hooked, customers trying out this free access can be migrated onto longer term offers.

Whether the offer is a simple speed or data one, or whether it is something more sophisticated, the critical factor is to enable the purchase or acceptance of the deal on the device, as your customer thinks about it. This is a turning point for the communications industry, this acceptance that everything must be responsive in real time.

 For more details visit us @www.urssystems.com

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Telecom Operators are innovating in one space and disrupting in another space, leveraging the cloud technology."

Indian telecom operators are now aggressively investing in cloud strategy to bring innovative services and products to the market while looking to implement data analytics to get more revenue from subscribers. Mobile Phone Operators have realised that their investment in cloud strategy will be very useful for their overall service portfolio.

For instance, European telcos have started innovative services line 'Gaming on Demand', wherein the gaming structure is on a cloud and a user can play it through a remote control by paying a subscription and are expecting the trend to come to India soon.

For more details visit us @ www.urssystems.com

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"START SMALL BUT START":

"Information sets you free." Maybe just benchmark fixed vs. variable, or run vs. grow or transform. "You can't manage what you can't measure."

IT has gleefully helped companies use metrics to give other employees and business units the equivalent of a 24/7/365 proctology exam.

"Every publicly traded company today is evaluated from a performance perspective on generally accepted accounting principles" that standardize metrics like income statements, balance sheets, cash flows, and changes in equity. "Those statements provide an apples-to-apples comparison. IT's never had that." It's not that there's no accounting now. But it's too general and not up to the task of metrics-driven decision-making. "Every organization, right now, manages their IT department with a general ledger," he says. "Those general ledgers are insufficient in developing a way to make decisions."

"The discussion of running IT as a business is driven by the business demanding that visibility."

"Start small, but start,". "Information sets you free." Maybe just benchmark fixed vs. variable, or run vs. grow or transform. "You can't manage what you can't measure."

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