C-Change 2013: What is a CIO's biggest obsession?

BANGALORE, INDIA: Today, it is very unlikely to come across a chief information officer (CIO) who has not heard of the terms - virtualization, cloud, and big data. However, Which among them is a his/hers biggest obsession?

Is it virtualization, which lets them optimize available resources, or is it the cloud that serves them additional compute/storage/software/network on demand or is it big data, which gives them an insight into all those data, in various sizes and shapes, that is pouring in from everywhere?

All the three have common objectives - save a few extra bucks, ease infrastructure management/deployment, help turning information into hard cash and ultimately help businesses to grow.

However, not all the three are equally important to these enterprise IT honchos, who set the ball rolling when it comes to IT implementations at their workplaces.

A panel, including four such decision makers, with Cyber Media editorial mentor Prasanto Kumar Roy as moderator, set out for a mission to find out, 'What are CIOs obsessed with today: Is it cloud, virtualization or Big data', on the second day of the tenth edition of CIOL's annual CIO summit, C-Change 2013.

Among the panelists were Chetan Agarwal, group CIO, Jindal, Venkatesh Natarajan, special director, IT, Ashok Leyland, Subodh Dubey, CIO, Usha International, Parag Arora, head, enterprise sales, Citrix Systems, B S Nagarajan, technology director, VMware India & SAARC and Ajayan N, director, EMC IT, and Bask Iyer, global CIO, Juniper.

The panel, which sat to analyse a survey conducted by CIOL during the event seeking answers for CIOs' priority in 2012 and 2013, noted that in 2012 none of the three - Virtualization, cloud and big data - was a priority to them. According to the survey, while several had a few plans around virtualization, cloud and big data were of not much of interest to them last year despite all the hypes.

"The top priority for CIOs in 2012, in terms of investment, was software licence, followed by data center virtualization. Although, there were a lot of interest around cloud, which was about moving away from traditional licensng model, companies were still spending a lot on old style licences. In traditional model, you buy software and licenses, whereas in a cloud model you pay for a service," noted Roy.

As we entered 2013, the priorities of CIOs took a C-Change. Virtualization, non-cloud applications, cloud technology and big data, in that order, became their priorities. However, there existed a lot discrepancy in terms of what was being said by IT companies with regards to these technology and what was in reality.

"CIOs realised that not everything about cloud and virtualization was as rosy as was being portrayed by IT vendors. Virtualization is supposed to save you a lot of money, however, when people implemented it, they found that they were not really saving money. Instead, they ended up spending a lot on new hardware, such as servers, new virtualization software and on infrastructure upgradation. Having said that, they also got some benefits such a manageability, ease of deployment, out of it. Virtualization is still in the early stages of the adoption curve, so as you scale up you will also get to see the real benfits of the technology," he added.

Now, coming to cloud, the scene is no different here either. Similar to virtualization, cloud too calls for initial investment or capex, contradictory to the norm. Though vendors were going gaga over cloud's opex and pay-as-you-go mode of payment, that was not the case. You still need a large amount of capex investment before going for a cloud service.

"In an enterprise scenario, the adoption of cloud is slow also because they have a lot of legacy systems. More than servers, the bigger problem are the applications because an enterprise has invested so much money and time into them that and so cannot easily throw it away. The journey to cloud have to be done in a very rapid pace. You cannot do it as and when a particular product is replaced. This transformation has to be done within a period of six months or a year and that means investing a lot upfront."

In terms of adoption, cloud is more of a choice for small and medium sized enterprises than that of their larger counterpart.

"There is a lot of interest from small and mid sized companies for public cloud. However, large enterprise and companies, who are more comfortable with private cloud, pointed out that they were not finding the right supplier who can give them enterprise applications, such as SAP-as-a-service etc."

Though concerns such as security of cloud applications are receding gradually, there are still other concerns on the infrastructure front that are bothering a majority of the CIO community.

"Infrastructure issues, such as connectivity and network are bothering CIOs. They are not able to access applications when they need because of these issue. That is why a lot of large finance and banking companies are not looking for cloud services."

Coming to the last obsession of the CIOs, which is big data, there are a few technology savvy companies such as Meru Cabs who have implemented it and are using the analytics to their favour, whereas there are a few companies such as SAIL, who are not so tech-savvy, who have just started their journey with big data. There is a lot more evolve in terms of the definition of big data and its usage, the panel concludes.