CIO Connect: What are the challenges that companies across the globe are facing due to increasing mobile workforce?

Shaw: Mobility has become more complex for enterprises, and particularly for multinationals that need to manage the mobility of their staff across many countries. According to IDC, the number of mobile workers accessing enterprise systems worldwide will top the one billion mark this year and touch 1.2 billion by 2013. There are simply more users with more devices using more applications. In addition there has been a blurring of the boundaries between business and personal usage and many IT managers struggle to enforce company policies while employees demand more consumer-like devices and applications. Their need for support in managing this complexity and cost has never been greater.

Some of the IT challenges faced due to enterprise mobility are:

Securing information systems
Integrating technologies
Supporting devices
Containing costs
Controlling personal use
Training users
Justifying investments
Limiting use

CIO Connect: What are some of the evolving trends and challenges in the remote access space?

Shaw: According to Frost & Sullivan the clientless remote support market is projected to hit global revenues of $588 million by 2014. Several trends are driving this growth:  the economy is forcing businesses to do more with less; there is a shortage of skilled IT workers at branch locations and telecommuters, remote workers and mobile workers are increasing as a percentage of the workforce.  Security is the biggest challenge when it comes to remote access. However, in a world that depends on an increasingly mobile workforce as well as online communications for conducting business, eliminating remote access in the interests of security is counterproductive to say the least.

LogMeIn is very aware of the growing needs of the large enterprises and thus it provides solutions that help remotely support and manage hundreds or thousands of desktops, laptops, servers, kiosks, POS machines and the applications that run on them. LogMeIn also provides cross-platform capabilities which include support for Windows PCs, Macintosh computers and smartphones, including BlackBerry, iOS, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices.

Increasing mobility also increases the possibility of data loss? What steps should be taken to curtail this?

Shaw: Devices like tablets and smartphones are becoming access devices and enterprises are still figuring out how to best ensure data is neither lost nor accessed by unauthorized people.  Enforcing password policies and employing capabilities that allow IT helpdesk to remotely lock a lost or stolen device are musts.  Furthermore, keeping data behind a firewall on the network (where it can be backed up regularly) helps ensure its integrity.  Software like LogMeIn’s remote access solution, Ignition, enables users maintain the high level of mobility that they have become accustom to and get access to the data on the corporate network via their tablet or smartphone, without actually downloading or storing that data on the device itself.  

Please discuss the business benefits of deploying remote support tools.

There are many advantages that companies can gain from remote support tools are. Some of them are:

Anytime, anywhere support: Remote support tools offer IT teams the flexibility to support a vast range of devices, wherever the user may be, as long as they’re connected to the Internet.  Some scenarios where remote support may come into play include setup and configuration of services such as email or calendars, assisting users with FAQs of their device or its programs, diagnosing and resolving errors and issues, and much more.

High-quality support experience: Remote support capabilities enable technicians to connect, diagnose, and solve user’s issues quickly and effectively, and can help shorten average handle times.  What’s more, the overall perception of technicians’ proficiency is perceived by users to be higher during calls that involve a remote support session compared with those without.

Improved first call resolution: By providing multi-session handling, instant chat, diagnostic tools, technician collaboration and more, remote support tools help reduce escalations to level two supports and solve more issues on the first call.

CIO Connect: Inability to provide mobility and flexibility can potentially result in costing the business millions in lost productivity and missed sales. However, this can also leave an organization vulnerable to security threats. In such a scenario, how can CIOs secure their company while heeding to new-age trends like mobility?

Shaw: At LogMeIn, we take the security and protection of our customer’s data very seriously. Our products are architected with security being the most important design objective. In fact the security standards and encryption techniques used in our products are the same as those used for online banking. As part of this commitment, our datacenters and source code are continually reviewed by independent, accredited third party audit firms to ensure that the information remains confidential.

We detail our security standards under the following tabs:

SSL/TLS communications: This is the communications protocol used by LogMeIn.  It is the standard protocol used for Web-based commerce or online banking. It provides authentication and protection against eavesdropping, tampering and message forgery.

Authentication: LogMeIn hosts maintain a persistent connection with a LogMeIn server. When a user logs on to LogMeIn.com, the user's browser verifies the identity of the server behind the scenes, using the server's certificate, just like the hosts do. The user in turn authenticates to LogMeIn.com with an email address and password combination, where the password is verified. Users also need to authenticate to every LogMeIn host they access remotely.

Intrusion resistance: Authenticating with LogMeIn.com or (in case of a browser left unattended in the wrong place at the wrong time) authenticating with the host can be subject to brute force login attempts by unauthorized users. Both LogMeIn.com and the host employ simple but efficient lockout mechanisms that only allow a few incorrect logins before locking the account or the offending IP address.
Auditing and logging: LogMeIn.com has granular auditing capabilities available under a user's account security settings. These audit messages will notify users via email when an important change (such as adding a new computer) or a suspicious event (such as an incorrect login) occurs. Furthermore, LogMeIn.com provides extensive reporting capabilities on past remote access sessions.

CIO Connect: Which markets have seen the most adoption of remote access tools?

Shaw: Remote access is really a horizontal solution, with businesses from consulting and professional services, IT services and real estate, to retail, distribution, finance and healthcare all having needs to enable their employees with remote access.  

CIO Connect: What are your plans for India?

Shaw: India is a very important market for us.  In the last six months we have grown our customer base to include some of the larger Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Accenture, iYogi, Quatrro are few bigger customers for us in India out of more than 20 enterprises who are using our solutions.

We want to build up on this initial momentum and are ramping in India by adding more sales and support staff. The key markets/ verticals that we plan to target in India are MSPs, outsourced IT services organizations and mobile service providers. Any organization providing technical support to internal and external customer can benefit from our solutions.

CIO Connect: Can you discuss some of the key trends in enterprise PC buying from a global and India perspective? How are you exploring the enterprise mobility phenomenon?

Agarwal: 2011 will be a year of transformation for the enterprise segment. A recent report from Deloitte reveals that enterprises with highly distributed workforce are expected to embrace mobile computing platforms this year. They will begin to adopt tablet computers more extensively as business computing tools and could account for 25 percent of all tablet PC buyers this year. Industry experts also infer that enterprise customers today want uncompromised product quality, mobility, security and reliability above everything else. Therefore there is a possibility that developers may prioritize designing software for mobile devices over others.

As Indian enterprises are witnessing huge growth in their volume of mobile workers, there is a natural progression towards more sophisticated and mobile computing devices – ideally of compact size with a larger screen, to enhance video-conferencing, document-viewing/editing, web browsing and presentation quality. Lenovo’s ThinkPads are designed to be the ultimate business tool and are setting standards for enterprise computing across the globe. Through our stylish and robust T-series and X-series of ThinkPads, we leverage the growing demand for mobility.

CIO Connect: How has the scenario changed among Indian enterprises post the recession? Will the dynamics change because of the economic uncertainty in the United States and Europe?

Agarwal: In the course of economic recovery across the world, enterprises are more RoI-driven than ever before with an eye for measurable productivity. Analysts now predict that the overall enterprise IT spending will slow down in 2011 compared to the growth in 2010, and Asia Pacific will have a significant role to play from a global perspective.   

A November 2010 report from Gartner predicted that enterprise IT spending in the Asia-Pacific region was expected to rebound in 2010 and grow further to $312.3 billion in 2011. The report also attributed the growth in 2010 to pent-up demand following budget freezes in 2009 and the need to replace ageing hardware.

Lenovo has being growing from strength to strength in the enterprise segment over the last few quarters with a market share of 21.8 percent as per Q4 CY10. We attribute our success to aggressively pursuing new business, especially in the Very Large Enterprise (VLE) and Large Enterprise (LE) segments. We are also betting big on the Mid-market, Education and Government segments, along with BFSI, Telecom and Manufacturing verticals in India.

CIO Connect: What are some of the Green initiatives that have been incorporated by Lenovo?

Agarwal: Lenovo defines a ‘Green’ product as one that is built from eco-friendly materials, features lower power consumption and computer power management capabilities. It is packaged with recyclable materials and is ultimately responsible for the decrease in carbon dioxide emissions.

Lenovo focuses on minimizing environmental impact in all aspects of its business, from product design, supplier selection to manufacturing, facilities management, transportation and product lifecycle management, product end-of-life disposal and recycling.

The company leads the industry in offering PCs made with post-consumer recycled materials. Since 2008, Lenovo has used more than 6.3 million kilograms of post-consumer recycled plastics in its PCs. Lenovo has an extensive list of EPEAT Gold-rated products such as the entire range of Lenovo ThinkVision monitors, all ThinkPad notebooks and 90 percent of Lenovo IdeaPad notebooks. EPEAT rates products on a number of environmental factors such as recycling programs and choice of materials for PCs and packaging.

With its ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops, Lenovo continues to expand its Green commitment. The ThinkPads L series, SL series and the ThinkCentre M90z incorporate post-consumer recycled materials such as plastic bottles – waste that would typically end up in a landfill. For example, the ThinkCentre M90z features up to 40 percent post consumer-recycled content, the equivalent of 65 plastic bottles. The ThinkCentre M90z is also the industry’s first TCO certified Edge all-in-one PC and is EPEAT Gold, Energy Star 5.0 and Greenguard certified.

CIO Connect: What is your strategy to reach out to tier two and tier three cities?

Agarwal: We have consciously strengthened our channel strategy to empower partner base in tier two and tier three cities. Regular trainings are conducted every quarter in non-metro cities for a wide audience entailing not just business partners but their entire teams. These training sessions educate them about the current schemes and initiatives from Lenovo India.

We also have monthly calls with all our channel partners and sales representatives across cities irrespective of tier to update them on the latest developments on the channel front. Lenovo also emphasises specific product updates in these cities in quiz or contest formats to keep their interest and motivation levels soaring at par with those of metro cities.

Thammaiah B N, Director, Kelly IT Resources

CIO Connect: What is the recruitment scenario in the Indian IT industry? How have things changed post the economic slowdown? Can you share some study to put things in perspective?

Thammaiah: Right now the IT industry is hiring and will continue to hire in the coming quarters. While one can always wish for more visibility on industry-macro factors, what is available is good enough for most IT companies to make hiring decisions. Hiring now is to ensure talent availability for bagged deals, orders in pipeline, expected new wins and some large contracts that will come for renegotiation. A part of hiring is also to refill attrition that stands around 15 percent (as of the last quarter) and is expected to increase with more business deals being signed.

Economic slowdown has brought prudence to otherwise runaway hiring strategies that were rampant before. IT companies are now more mindful of hiring a mix of freshers and laterals. For example, more offers will go out for freshers in the first quarter of the coming financial year. Candidates are seeing sunny days too with most of their wishes being met by employers at least in the niche skills segment. Candidates accepting new lateral offers have significantly increased over the last three quarters. Apart from looking to serve new projects with fresh recruits, companies are also beginning to build bench strengths for future business. IT biggies are stocking up skills and training them in advance in anticipation of new contracts expected to be bagged in the near future.

The salaries have risen in general more so at mid and senior level. The lateral hire salaries in mid segment for niche skill-sets have gone up by 30 percent to 50 percent of annual cost to company. Salaries of regular skills have gone up 20 percent to 30 percent. However companies will exert caution and will not arbitrarily offer hikes. Companies hiring at fresher level will look at giving around 10 percent hike this year.

Post the slowdown there has been a significant change in acceptance of temporary mode of workforce by both employees and employers’ alike. This is done through specialized global recruitment firms such as Kelly IT Resources that specialize and understand professional and technical talent pool. Our clients look to us as partners who play a significant role in their success.

CIO Connect: How should traditional organizations change their approach to attract young/better talent?

Thammaiah: The situation will be more of hunger amidst plenty wherein we will have a large talent pool which will find itself difficult to get suitably employed and on the other side corporates will be still hungry for the right talent.

From a talent pool view we already see certain changes that traditional organisations are adopting. IT organisations are going public with “we hire non-engineering talents also” statements. This is a bold and a much needed step. We need to ‘de-skill’ tasks and define micro-competencies. Our education system does provide trainable talent who may not be engineers but can handle basic tasks of engineers with added benefits. This will help companies tap larger and better pool of talent.

Another challenge for current managers is to fruitfully engage with Generation Y as they will be the future workforce of most IT organizations. The digital natives will work for organizations that understand them and make an effort to work cohesively rather than obsessing over its own brand and traditional way of working. Brand names and bottom lines will eventually erode if organizations do not proactively engage with the millennials. Its time HR thinks like millennials to attract better talent.

A three year or lesser stint in an organization is considered good unlike the earlier average of around five years. Employees are getting more transactional in their approach with their companies while expecting the reverse from their employer. In this environment robust appraisal processes can bring more sanity for both employer and employee. A friendly organization with a fair appraisal processes is more in demand than the next higher paying organization. The organization should also offer formal programmes to develop potential leaders, ensure that the right reward programmes and incentives are in place to retain the staff they’ve invested in and ensure ongoing monitoring of potential hot spots across the organization.

Traditional organizations should:

• Define roles for specific leadership positions based on preferred strategy
• Identify the competencies required for each of these jobs
• Determine the levels of fundamental capacities of learning, thinking, relating and acting needed to acquire these competencies
• Define values which are needed to display the desired behaviours
• Identify individuals who would fit into these positions
• Establish mutually acceptable contracts for employment between the organization and the employee and lay the foundation of a win-win relationship

CIO Connect: What are some of the retention strategies that you would advice IT leaders to incorporate?

Thammaiah: Good retention starts with right hires. Organisations give very less lead time to its HR personnel for recruitment. This coupled with market competition will spell wrong hires who contribute to attrition. Typically wrong hires are due to misfits in the area of cultural environment, salary, role aspirations and the reporting senior equation. Organisation need to be clear and upfront on what it can provide up and set appropriate expectations right from the word go.

Communication is key for retention. Employees need right communication at the right time from the right people. Interactions by top management at frequent basis will engage people better than any expensive gift.

Skill upgradation programme for employees and lessons on managing technical people for managers is important for retention. Engaging employees with a clear career growth path is a best practice that can help retain people longer.

CIO Connect: Can you share some best practices for effective talent management?

Thammaiah: I think the first 90 days is a crucial period for a new employee. HR should facilitate a 90-day programme wherein key milestones are achieved. This will encompass helping new employees to understand his/her reporting manager better, understand work objectives, and get aligned to the goals of the organization and its way of working.

Assigning an official buddy who is a senior colleague and who will be responsible for the new employee for the first month till the employee gets familiar and comfortable with the organization works wonders.

Reviewing new employees after 90 days in the organization is a good learning for the organization and makes the employee feel that they are being cared for.

CIO Connect: How has emergence of other third world countries that are able to provide cheaper outsourcing solutions than India affected the job market in India?

Thammaiah: In ITES there are serious contenders to some of the work done here. However, India has been steadily engaging in high-end work. The Indian IT Industry will be able to provide what clients are looking for, be it cost advantage or high-end work. Tier two cities are becoming more attractive and we have a large talent pool in the offing. These elements will converge to keep Indian IT a step ahead.

CIO Connect: What are some of the innovative staffing solutions you can help IT companies with?

Thammaiah: I think IT organizations need to make a differentiation between talent types. We still find that organizations spend high during temporary or time limited demand spikes. If it looks around it will find similar talent pool on contract which comes at a lesser cost. However, one must be careful and engage with domain specialist like Kelly IT Resources rather than a general player who may not appreciate the difference between IT and other industries.

VC Gopalratnam, VP-IT and CIO, Globalization, Cisco

CIO Connect: What are some of the trends we should watch out for in 2011?

Gopalratnam: From a technology point of view, we foresee the following trends in the coming months:

Video and collaboration: We believe that there will be a ‘video’ explosion in homes and businesses as it is increasingly becoming the most important means by which we communicate and share information. Cisco bets on video applications for enhanced growth in the Internet Protocol (IP) telephony business in India. Unified communication systems including IP phones, conferencing and messaging solutions are fast gaining traction as productivity improvement tools among small and medium enterprises. To help further improve productivity, Cisco will launch enhanced IP telephony tools to incorporate computing capabilities. We will also introduce “virtualization in communication” from the first quarter of calendar year 2011.

Cisco expects collaboration to drive the next wave of increase in productivity. Collaboration technologies (unified communications, videoconferencing, telepresence, Web 2.0 applications) and mobility solutions (solutions that enable users to access the network irrespective of his/her location, solutions for mobile workforces) will be the areas of focus. The integration of data, voice and video with mobility over the network has led to the development of technologies like telepresence and digital media which have greatly enhanced the collaborative experience. In addition, unified communications and its component technologies are speeding-up businesses on their path to going green while reducing carbon-heavy overheads.

Datacentre / virtualization: Datacentre consolidation will be high on every leader’s agenda to ensure optimal utilization of existing resources and assets. Virtualization will play a big role in the near future as IT organizations morph into a more services management framework. Cisco’s virtualization vision is to aggregate siloed pools of storage, compute, network, operating systems, and applications, into unified, shared resource pools linked with an intelligent unified fabric.

Also, from an end-user perspective, we will see the following trends:

Cisco recently conducted a study across 13 countries including India, which showed some very interesting results – two of three workers expect IT to allow access to corporate information with any device – personal or company-issued. Interestingly, workers rated ability to work anywhere, anytime, as stronger than desire for higher salary.

Another leg of the survey showed disconnect between IT policies and the workforce. As technology trends alter the way businesses communicate and operate, employees work in a more mobile fashion and use numerous devices, social media and new forms of communication such as video.  More than two-thirds of these workers surveyed believed their companies’ IT policies could be improved, and at least two of every five (41 percent) said they break those policies to meet their needs.

Globally, more than two-thirds of IT professionals (68 percent) felt that the importance of video communications to their company would increase in the future.

CIO Connect: What are your views on Cloud computing? Does it stand true to all the hype surrounding it or is it an old concept packaged in a new way?

Gopalratnam: Cloud computing is definitely emerging as an important phenomenon in the IT industry. We, at Cisco, see a lot of potential in this, and are actively using Cloud computing, both in the form of private and public Clouds. Currently, a lot of data from Cisco does reside on the Cloud.

Internally, Cisco has developed a private Cloud enabled by Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services (CITEIS) framework, built on Cisco technologies and home grown tools to enable IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). The goal of this private Cloud is to reduce the infrastructure provisioning time to 15 minutes – reducing time to capability and increasing efficiency and productivity. The private Cloud also helps optimize infrastructure cost.

Security is definitely a concern area; so we ensure that all sensitive data – for example, customer information, etc. is stored within our own systems, and not put on the Cloud. However, we use the Cloud model extensively for less critical information.

CIO Connect: You have gone on record and said that virtualization is going to transform the way that everyone works. Can you please elaborate with examples?

Gopalratnam: CEOs are facing key business challenges such as globalization, innovation, new business models, evolving customer transactions to interactions, environmental sustainability, new partnerships, and the need to reduce costs. To address these challenges, companies are adding rich communication, information and collaboration services. These services are increasingly being delivered by a virtualized datacentre. In supporting the business, IT has unique operational challenges: underutilized resources, managing the hyper growth of storage, dealing with compliance, legislation and security, the increasing cost of facility management (power, cooling, footprint, etc.), new application provisioning, dealing with complex, heterogeneous infrastructures as well as a need to transform IT into a strategic enabler of the business. We believe virtualization has the potential to address these challenges.

CIO Connect: What are the best practices that you follow in building a global talent pool for Cisco?

Gopalratnam: A company has to invest in practices that will lead to better utilization of resources, dynamic decision making and increased productivity. The technologies and policies adopted should enable flexibility at work and help employees achieve work-life balance. As companies become more global with geographically dispersed teams, there is a need to implement flexible practices such as telecommuting and work from home, especially at the executive and supervisory levels. Technology-enabled flexible work options allow employees to contribute productively across time-zones and global teams.

Organisations also need to be attuned to the needs and working styles of the younger generation, which often form a major mass of the working population. The younger tech savvy crowd usually takes up job opportunities that allow for a fun and collaborative environment without many restrictions.

The workplace is not just a place anymore, it’s a very important part of the employees’ lives. Hence the IT department’s role is only going to get more strategic as it tries to help businesses stay agile and increase productivity. The idea is to create a flexible, secure, next-generation workspace that is relevant and personalized.

According to the Cisco Connected Report, majority of employees worldwide say they don't need to be in the office to be productive and that they value mobility more than higher salary.

Cisco is focused on offering its employees and customers with capabilities for anytime, anywhere, any device connectivity. In the past three years, Cisco IT led the company in its commitment to invest in excess of $20m in collaboration technologies – including Cisco Telepresence, unified communications, Webex and Cisco Shared Workspace. Cisco’s collaborative solutions are specifically engineered to boost employee potential and to power one’s employees, customers and partners.

One of the key initiatives in the Cisco IT organization is the Cisco on Cisco program – which basically utilizes all Cisco technologies for enterprise applications within our own workplace to provide an IP enabled work environment – through IP communications, wireless networks and VPN. With a Cisco on Cisco initiative based on our Connected Real Estate solution - we have enabled employees to work at their desks, in conference rooms, outdoor environments, at home, and at remote locations with networking capability, enabling productivity anytime – anywhere.

Cisco’s solutions enable easy as well as secure access to the company's business data, phone system, applications, and resources via secure, wired, wireless, and fast Internet connections.

Cisco’s VOIP laptop-based IP Communicator is also extremely useful to join WebEx and conference calls as the employees work from home or travel on business.  

Cisco Virtual Office is a set of secure solutions that allow businesses to extend their enterprise – and productivity – by “bringing the office” to employees who regularly work in a variety of remote settings, such as branch locations or from a home office.

One of the most critical and valuable technology that employees leverage almost on a daily basis is telepresence. With teams, stakeholders, clients and partners around the world, Telepresence saves the trouble of traveling very frequently, while giving employees the experience of direct, face to face interaction.

These tools and options allow easy access to work from home and hence reducing leave absences and complications in times of personal needs. Based on this, Cisco has also been successfully able to decouple revenue and headcount growth from carbon emission growth – and reduced carbon emissions by 10 percent per employee (emissions of 98 Telepresence meetings equals an international flight from North America to Europe).

Web2.0 tools

Apart from this, the Cisco IT and corporate communications have been helping to bring Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise and integrating them with video, telepresence, and other unified communications technologies on the network.  

Cisco also uses Cisco Quad, an enterprise collaboration platform that combines the power of social networking with communication, business information, and content management systems. At the same time, it meets IT's needs for policy management, scalability, security, and ease of management.

Other social media tools Cisco uses for internal communications include:

• Blogs - to post text, images and video to a broad audience instantly
• Communities – collaborate and work in a wide internal social network of powerful tools
• WebEx Connect – group workspaces with IM, file sharing, voice and video calling
• Tagging – can tag a profile or content to bring relevant information higher visibility
• Discussion forums – engage in group discussions and access previously discussed topics

CIO Connect: Is IT still being seen as a cost centre by the top management?

Gopalratnam: IT is not seen as a cost center in the enterprise and plays a very critical role in the current business environment, where the focus is on higher productivity, globalization and newer business models. At Cisco, IT is a thought leader in terms of utilizing new technologies and measures to enhance productivity, provide faster return on investment, adopt new business and technology models to stay ahead of competition, support environment sustainability and reduce costs. IT provides a competitive advantage to Cisco.

At Cisco, the IT strategy is aligned to the business strategy - for the benefit of customers, suppliers and partners. There is a synergy among the company’s executive team, not just between the CEO and CIO, cascading down the business.

To achieve this, IT must play its part in understanding the business and different functions. For example, the sales function has to be understood to deliver an application that will be effective for the sales people and appropriate to their work style.

One of the solutions is to hire personnel who are experienced in particular business areas. The IT team needs to be a part of business meetings in order to ensure decisions about technology meet the business’ needs.

Another alignment issue is the ability to respond to change in real-time. The goals keep changing according to the company’s rapidly changing mandate. CIOs will have to manage this change without slowing the business processes. The services have to be delivered on demand and capacity managed dynamically. Everything can be made available via the Web.

CIO Connect: Please talk in detail about Cisco’s program Cisco on Cisco wherein all Cisco technologies which are marketed to customers are first tried and tested within the Cisco Enterprise environment, i.e. Cisco IT. Which is the latest exercise undertaken in this program?

Gopalratnam: Cisco on Cisco is a successful, global initiative that is a fundamental business strategy and cultural element of Cisco. In telling the Cisco on Cisco story, we relate Cisco IT’s own enterprise technology journey from the early days to the present, and looking ahead to where we want to go.

Cisco on Cisco is where all Cisco technologies are first tried and tested within the Cisco Enterprise environment by Cisco IT. In Cisco IT, the network is truly the platform for bringing together business and technology architectures.

Today for Cisco, IT is the strategy and is a unique organization in its category where it is, in fact, an integral part of the Cisco sales team. Cisco IT is the poster child for Cisco products and technologies. The CIO function helps connect the dots for the different products and technologies to align with our strategic imperatives focused on creating new and replicable business models, enabling productivity as well as showing other growth opportunities.

From a collaboration and communication perspective, Cisco on Cisco has the Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) built on Cisco’s QUAD enterprise collaboration platform.  IWE is an enterprise social networking platform to enable collaborative way of working.

We also have created an end-to-end deployment of video (Flip, WebEx, Tandberg, Telepresence) for different applications involving different end point devices. At Cisco, we also support the ‘any device any time anywhere’ philosophy – where Cisco applications and email access are made available for user chosen end point devices.

Chamindra de Silva, CTO and Director, FOSS disaster management, Project Sahana and Head, Strategic Initiatives, Global Technology Office, Virtusa

CIO Connect: In spite of significant cost advantages and liberal license policies, we are yet to witness widespread adoption of open source. What is holding Indian enterprises back?

de Silva: There has been a misconception that adoption of Open Source is the adoption of Linux and application running on Linux. However, any global software services provider that delivers solutions in Java or .NET today utilizes a significant amount of Open Source components in order to reduce the cost of production.  Finally, many of the providers that deliver portal based services are typically using a lot of Open Source to deliver their solutions, especially as metering of software royalties based on proprietary licensing in the Cloud can be limiting and complex. Google, Yahoo, IBM and Facebook are good examples of companies which have built their business models harnessing Open Source. It is precisely the liberal licensing polices, especially the permissive Open Source ones such as Apache/BSD that has helped this progression.

CIO Connect: What are the various ways in which ICTs can be used to manage and resolve crises?

de Silva: As much as food, shelter, medical aid, and security are important for the affected victims in a disaster, so is the information which is needed for identifying those needs in the first place and then create the essential connections for recovery. Correct and timely information is critical to effective response, especially during the first three days following an event, when there is an opportunity to save lives with timely action.

There is also an increase in the adoption of mobile phones in the world today, which means that a large proportion of the world population have a mobile phone at hand for emergency coordination during disasters. Typical problems where ICTs can help are in areas like helping to trace missing people, matching aid needs to donations, effective distribution of relief agencies across the region and better situation awareness so that decision-makers can make the right critical choices to help better save lives and alleviate suffering. Mobiles, GIS visualizations, social media and Twitter are some of the new trends to support coordination in response.

CIO Connect: How can open source be used in humanitarian and educational initiatives?

de Silva: There are multiple areas, particular to the humanitarian response domain, where Open Source software freedom and practices align to the principles in the humanitarian domain. The domain is dominated by NGOs and Government/UN relief agencies and there are certain aspirations on conduct (captured by the Red Cross Code of Conduct) about how any service should be provided. Key areas are:

No discrimination on access: From the time an Open Source package is available online, it becomes a global public good that anyone, irrespective of race, station, or creed, can download and use, customize, and apply to serve their respective relief effort.

Ability to leave technology behind: Irrespective of the support group that brought the technology to help the response effort, Open Source is a product that can be left behind and maintained by local groups if required. Otherwise you leave a dependency on an organization.

Lower cost: Open Source reduces the cost of software for disaster response, which means more funds are available for essential aid.

Transparency and neutrality: The software design and mechanism for building FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is transparent and neutral. These characteristics are particularly important for countries that mistrust the origins and affiliations of technology. With FOSS communities that are mature, global and diverse, the software has no specific alignment to a particular political agenda.

Open standards and data exchange: With many different systems in operation during a disaster response, it can be a significant issue if they do not share data. To avoid confusion and inefficiencies, it is essential for systems to be able to share information through open standards. Open Source has a track record with open standards from TCP/IP and it helps promote the spread and implementation of open standards.

Shared inter-organizational development: NGOs and humanitarian relief groups all need software tools to be effective and competition is not as prevalent as in other industries. Sharing the development of the IT infrastructure is a natural way to reduce costs and promote integrated response efforts.

CIO Connect: Please talk in detail about HFOSS. What has been the acceptance of this model?

de Silva: Humanitarian-FOSS or HFOSS is simply the application of Open Source to the humanitarian response domain. As mentioned above there is some natural alignment with the aspiration and value of the domain. HFOSS is not different to FOSS, but rather a specialization of FOSS. It is not so much a model, but a series of best practices in the application of IT solutions to the domain.

H-FOSS solutions have to be accessible on pervasive platforms (e.g. Windows XP), designed to be resilient to network outages and be easily accessible to the lay user. They also are expected to have a high focus on quality assurance as the systems are mission-critical in nature. Effectively both humanitarian and Open Source aspiration are promoted, but given a choice the bias will always be given to the humanitarian response priorities.

In terms of acceptance among popular organizations that have H-FOSS projects are Ushahidi, Google, IBM, InSTEDD, Sahana, Frontline SMS, OLPC and OpenMRS. Additionally there is adoption in student courses in the US Universities driven by Trinity College, CN. H-FOSS adds an additional philanthropic motive for a student that can go a long way to motivate them on the work.

CIO Connect: Please share a background on Project Sahana. As the Director of FOSS disaster management - Project Sahana, what does your role entitle? Can you share some of your achievements?

de Silva: The Sahana project origins are with the devastating Asian Tsunami in 2004 in Sri Lanka, which really inspired the H-FOSS movement. Sahana means ‘Relief’ in Sinhala. At the time the ICT industry in Sri Lanka got together to volunteer to help resolve some of the coordination issues being faced with managing  the large scale of the disaster with IT solutions for the common problems mentioned above.

The result was Sahana, and Open Source was a natural way for the ICT industry to collaborate non-competitively to build the solution. Subsequently we realized that this solution could be beneficial to other countries as well and it was subsequently rebuilt as a more generic open source disaster management platform under a non-profit FOSS research and development organization in Sri Lanka supported by the ICT industry called Lanka Software Foundation (LSF). This helped Sahana grow to an international disaster management system that has been deployed multiple times in service of large scale disasters around the world in countries such as China, Peru, Philippines, Pakistan, Haiti and Indonesia. It is also being pre-deployed for preparedness by Governments in Sri Lanka and US.

I was originally a volunteer architect during the Tsunami from Virtusa, subsequently I took a sabbatical to play the leadership role as a PM/Architect on the rewrite and positioning of Sahana as a global Open Source disaster management system in LSF. Sahana now has an international community, it has its own non-profit foundation based in US and I currently volunteer as a Director and CTO. My day job is as the head of strategic initiatives at Virtusa and the company has been very supportive of my involvements in HFOSS and Sahana.

Virtusa was one of the original organizations that donated a lot of support immediately after the Tsunami. I believe businesses have a social responsibility to be of service in times of need in the communities they build their businesses.