Incorporating the most advanced energy efficiency best practices at the design stage is crucial for newcomers and existing operators in the Indian market

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INTELLIGENT cOMPuTING | Cover Story

Dan Scarbrough

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

Empowering data centers

It’s all about power reliability and availability when it comes to data centers in India. Over the last decade, the global industry has strived for significant improvements in overall data center efficiency through implementing a ‘Green Data Center’

E

veryone knows that one of the largest cost drivers for the data center industry is the cost of power.

It takes huge amounts of electricity to power and cool a data center, so when it comes to data centers in India it is really important the industry strives to improve power efficiency, reliability, and availability for current and future data center stock.

Currently, the continued lack of availability of reliable power supply is not doing India justice when it comes to

its attractiveness as a location for data centers. Presently a significant number of data centers in India rely on back- up energy sources such as diesel generators, in order to face the regular power shutdown that can be around two to three hours daily. Thus, while locating a data center, the service provider needs to calculate the trade-off between reliability and tariff reforms in a state. Higher reliability typically comes in states with higher energy costs.

Rising energy costs increase the data center operational

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As a result of the advances in the application layer, incremental marginal gains in energy efficiency can more easily be achieved south of the rack. These are now being considered as the risk of application failure reduces.

KEY TaKEaWaYS

Adoption of energy-efficient practices can improve the global competitiveness and sustainability of data centers in India. Previous studies have concluded that advance- ment of energy efficiency standards through policy and regulatory mechanisms is the fastest path to accelerate the adoption of energy efficient practices. This is not different in India and the country is gearing up to extend a set of controls and certifications for data centers that can help tackle the increasing global environmental issues.

These regulations and accreditations will hopefully assist data centers to adopt best practices for better energy-efficient, effective and robust infrastructure. Unfortunately, it is not looking like these accreditations will be legally mandatory for a data center in India, but will clearly add value if data centers choose to adopt them. Being op- erationally efficient and adopting best practices from an energy efficiency perspective is just one side of the PUE equation. Removing ‘comatose’ servers and redundant IT assets is a completely different challenge but certainly, one that Indian companies should consider exploring, but that’s a whole other discussion.

(The author is Co-Founder of DCD Holdings)

Adoption of energy-efficient practices can improve the global competitiveness and sustainability of data centers in India

Incorporating the most advanced energy efficiency best practices at the design stage is crucial for newcomers and existing operators in the Indian market

expenses. In power-deficit India, energy efficiency can offer significant benefits to data centers including increased reliability of electricity supply, reduction in operating costs and an overall enhancement in operations.

India has significant potential for data center growth due to lots of factors not least the countries skilled labor force. However, companies need to find ways to mitigate risks related to power reliability and power cost issues.

MEaSuRING ENERGY EffIcIENcY

Over the last decade, the global industry has strived for significant improvements in overall data center efficiency through implementing a ‘Green Data Center’ strategy.

Looking at a comprehensive energy efficiency assessment framework can have a direct impact on OPEX. All data center operators in India, if they haven’t done so already, should be developing a framework for maximizing the performance of their existing infrastructure assets and putting operational disciplines in place to maintain them.

Incorporating the most advanced energy efficiency best practices at the design stage is crucial for newcomers and existing operators in the Indian market. Compar- ing sets of assessment data from each stage through the design to operation of a data center can help the operator validate the integration of energy efficiency measures in the design, and then assess these against the performance of the operational facility.

Applications are increasingly becoming “Geo Redun- dant’ with less risk of failure being placed on the underlying power infrastructure. This ability to migrate workloads on the server side is now becoming proven, reducing operator concerns about protecting power-related events for these geo-redundant applications. This, combined with a growing number of more reliable larger sized data centers, seems to be having a positive impact on overall systems availability.

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Sanjay agrawal

Decoding Data Center dynamics

Enterprises today are rethinking their datacenter strategies to suit the

technical disruptions in the market. For any business, it is necessary to

make informed infrastructure decisions to evaluate potential business

risks and cost overrunsc

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One of the major cost factors today in the data center is the back-up of data. Hyper-scale and next generation data centres have significantly reduced their back up costs is by leveraging intelligent object stores. Object stores provide back-up less self-protecting repositories. A content platform is an answer to creating a secure, simple and smart web-scale object storage platform. It addresses the challenge of managing large quantities of data, delivers superior security, overall TCO reduction, efficiency, and interoperability. In addition to being an object store, HCP helps efficient data management, data governance and adheres to compliance requirements.

One of the key elements that has transformed the data centre landscape is IT analytics. CIOs are creating Smart Data Centres by bringing in Analytics capabilities to IT operations to lower IT operational cost, reduce risk and increase IT agility. It helps predict system outages and improves business availability. There is a huge volume of IT systems data available which can be leveraged to identify data center inefficiencies and tools like Pentaho helps accelerate smart data centre journey.

For any business, it is necessary to make informed infrastructure decisions to evaluate potential business risks and cost overruns, before moving IT assets to a data center.

(Author is Director of Platforms and Solutions Group, Hitachi Vantara)

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ccording to a study by Gartner, the current datacenter market in India is valued at $2.2 billion, and is expected to touch US$4.5 billion mark by 2018. One of the major trends in data centers today is Flash adoption. Enterprises are creating Flash storage tier for business critical applications that are performance hungry to transform their end user experience. In addition to significant performance gains, Flash also results in reduced power cooling and space required for high performance needs. While flash must be embraced, at the same time the disk tier also has a substantial value as a high capacity tier for its cost efficiencies & operational flexibility. For example, one can leverage real time data tiering between flash and disk to optimize the cost and data centre environmental.

Software Defined Infrastructure is seen as the future of digital businesses as it maintains flexible scaling. An increase in adoption of SDS will power business demands as it eliminates hardware dependency and simplifies datacenter management for enterprises. Data Center Com- plexities can also be simplified with easy-to-deploy and management of hyperconverged infrastructure that aids intelligent automation, industry-leading policy-based management to deliver SLAs per VM, central management for the entire infrastructure stack. It also supports smart life-cycle management for firmware upgrades, el- ement visibility and troubleshooting while ensuring con- tinuous availability & accessibility to application and data.

Today with A ‘Unified Compute Platform’ it is possible that we can deliver this level of automation irrespective of the underlying platforms be it converged or hyperconverged.

Depending on the business requirements customers might find better value in converged or hyperconverged depending on the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). These trends in data centre technology help organizations focus on the business outcomes by shifting focus from operations to innovation.

One of the key elements that

has transformed the data centre

landscape is IT analytics. CIOs are

creating Smart Data Centres by

bringing in Analytics capabilities

to IT operations to lower IT

operational cost, reduce risk and

increase IT agility

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dIGITaL ENTERPRISE | talking Point

Shrikanth G

shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

—SRIdhaR PInnaPuREddY Founder & CEO CtrlS Datacenters

INDIA

DATACENTER MARKET IS VALUED AT

$2.2BN

Shrikanth G

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H

ow do you see the evolution of datacenters to what it is today - the datacenter tipping point and how it changed the IT infrastruc- ture market?

Earlier businesses would purchase their own infrastructure and operate an in-house corporate datacenter to support and run their business. But, with increasing need for uptime of near zero downtime the cost for redundant infrastructure would increase multi-fold and making managing datacenters unviable. Secondly, outages can cost a company millions of dollars in losses. Loss of data can derail them completely – in fact, according to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), USA, 93% of companies that faced a disaster exceeding ten or more days filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.

Hence, it is my belief that in the next 24 to 48 months 70% of in-house datacenters in India will move their infrastructure into large format datacenters providing near zero downtime. Alternatively, most of the CIOs will also consider cloud as an alternative as it eliminates the issues such as hardware refresh, annual maintenance costs, scalability issues, and challenges of resource optimiza- tion. This will reduce the need for servers, storage from an end-user perspective and focus shall move to large format providers who shall build the infrastructure for customers in the datacenter for colocation and cloud in the form of public, private, hybrid or community cloud.

According to Gartner, cloud spending is likely to surpass $677 million in 2017, while traditional data center outsourcing spend is estimated at $559 million, truly re- flecting the mindset of CIOs and businesses.

from a market perspective, what is your assessment of the India market - how is the market classified and what are the key growth drivers?

The India data center market is valued at $2.2 billion, and is forecasted to surpass $4.5 billion by 2018. For a moment, if we were to take a global view, 90% of world’s data has been generated in the less than thirty six months. Simi- larly, in India, the key growth drivers include rising growth of data, digitization, increasing number of interconnected

devices due to IoT, cost of servers. Besides, datacenter center as a part of overall IT budget is becoming exorbi- tant and slowness in building infrastructure (sometimes it takes a few months to procure hardware infrastructure) to address the growing business needs. As far as market classification is concerned, it is mostly divided between Tier-3 and Tier-4 datacenters as business seek high uptime, most business would prefer a Tier-4 datacenters as they provide near zero downtime.

What is your company’s play in the datacenter market?

CtrlS is India’s 1st and Asia’s largest Tier-4 datacenter provider. We have Tier-4 datacenter facilities across Mumbai, Noida and Hyderabad. Our Bangalore facility would be operational soon. We are soon announcing our second Hyderabad datacenter facility as well. Besides this, we operate a Tier-3 datacenter in Chennai – this is a joint venture between CtrlS and BNSL. We continue to enable Fortune 100 Global MNCs, Banks, Payment Gateways, Telecom, IT/ITeS companies, Manufacturing companies and Ecommerce players among others in our datacenter facilities. We provide industry best uptime SLA of 99.995%, lowest PUE of 1.42, carrier neutrality, robust security, and pollution free air in the datacenter to avoid corrosion of hardware and earthquake and flood proof facilities.

Our focus is on enabling mission critical applications with near zero downtime backed by industry’s highest SLA of 99.995%, lowest PUE supported by Carrier-Neu- trality, low latency which is key for business applications performance. We have a 24/7 monitoring and managed services team to support our customers who host their infrastructure in our datacenters.

If you were to wear a hat of a consultant - what according to you are some the key things a cIO should look before moving his IT assets to a datacenter?

To my mind (as a CIO), need for seamless availability of infrastructure, quick scalability of infrastructure to support business goals would be the major drivers for moving IT assets to a datacenter.

CtrlS (Asia’s Largest Tier 4 DC)has datacenters in Hyderabad, Mumbai and Noida. The company has developed the capabilities to provide platform level services which includes data center infrastructure, storage, backup, hardware, OS layers, network and security layers.It offers a host of outsourced business solutions and services such as Disaster Recovery on demand, Managed services, Private cloud-on- demand to enable clients to make the paradigm shift from the captive datacenter model to the outsourced

one. In an exclusive interview to Dataquest, Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder & CEO CtrlS Datacenters,

decodes the Datacenter market in India and the company’s play. Excerpts.

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Shrikanth G

—FORREST nORROd

SVP and GM- Enterprise, Embedded

& Semi-Custom Business Group (EESC Business Group), AMD

Shrikanth G

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H

ow do you see the evolution of datacenters to what it is today - how has it changed the IT infrastructure market?

The Data center is undergoing radical change, driven by the demand from consumers and cloud servers, and enabled by open source development. The traditional tower tucked in a corner humming away and hosting everyone’s e-mail and files is being quickly supplement- ed or replaced by cloud hosting. There are a number of macro trends changing server dynamics.

Virtualization is decoupling users, operating systems and applications from the hardware underneath;

containers are taking this a step further by enabling a massive number of micro services through dynamic resource allocation. These technologies enable easier application deployment and allow apps to be scaled up or down nearly instantaneously as demand changes.

Delivery of ‘IT as a service’ has made mega datacenters an efficient alternative to owning IT hardware. The growth of off-premise IT infrastructure means companies with tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of employees may not own a single server. They lease their infrastructure, applications, and IT services, often from facilities thousands of miles away. Billion dollar businesses serve millions of customers simul-

taneously via server farms the size of several football fields that can operate with incredible efficiency. Of course protecting customer’s data is a number one concern touching every part of the ecosystem. We at AMD are innovating at the processor level to account for these changes in order to power a highly scalable, secure data center.

from a market perspective, what is your assessment of the India market - how is the market classified and what are the key growth drivers?

India is a critical region for data center market growth.

As this country of 1 billion becomes highly digitized, organisations need robust, secure datacenters to store trillions of bites of data being generated each day. India is poised to become the second largest data center market in Asia-Pacific by 2020 on the back of government’s digitization initiatives and the increasing penetration of internet connectivity. According to IDC, the overall server market in India witnessed a year-over-year increase of 60% in terms of revenue to reach $304.6 million in Q2 2017 versus $190.4 million in Q2 2016. Data driven sectors like BFSI, Telecom, E-commerce, Manufacturing, IT & ITeS, and Government etc. are beginning to rely on third party data center.

Forrest Norrod, SVP and GM- Enterprise, Embedded & Semi-Custom Business Group (EESC Business Group), AMD, in an exclusive interview to Dataquest talks about the key trends shaping the data center space and how AMD is pionering new innovations. In this role, Norrod is responsible for managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering and sales for EESC businesses. He has more than 25 years of technology industry experience across a number of engineering and business management roles at both the chip and system level. Excerpts:

WE AT AMD ARE INNOVATING AT THE

PROCESSOR LEVEL

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What is aMd’s play in the datacenter market?

We build processors, CPU’s and GPU’s that power a Datacentre. We are the only company who build both!

In fact the 64-bit x86 processor was first introduced by AMD. In the last six to seven years, while cloud computing has become all prevalent, server technology itself had remained stagnant. Earlier this year, we launched ‘EPYC’

– our 32-core, 64-thread CPU to challenge the status quo. It marked our re-entry into the high performance server market and our intense focus to once again become a significant player in the data center. EPYC is built around a new, grounds up “Zen” x86 core that was 4 years in the making. It has exceptional memory and I/O capability and an industry-leading security solution.

EPYC, combined with our Radeon Instinct GPU has brought innovation and competition back to the datacenter market. Radeon Instinct products are designed to be the building-blocks for a new era of Deep Learn- ing and HPC data centers. We have designed and opti- mized Radeon Instinct server accelerator products and software platforms to bring customers a cost-effective machine learning alternative. The Radeon Instinct products are also ideal for data-centric HPC-class systems in academic, government lab, energy, life science, financial, automotive, and other industries.

The world’s leading data center service providers including Microsoft Azure, Baidu, Tencent, jD.com, 1&1, Bloomberg, Dropbox and LexisNexis have endorsed

EPYC. We also have the largest server manufacturers including HPE, Dell, Asus, Gigabyte, Inventec, Lenovo, Sugon, Supermicro, Tyan, and Wistron starting to use EPYC. We at AMD are very positive about gaining significant market share in the data center market in the coming years.

What are the key elements that go in the creation of energy efficient data centers?

The biggest waste of power at data centers is due to underutilization of servers. The second biggest reason is inefficient servers. Many IT organizations purchase 2-socket servers and only populate 1-socket. Others purchase 2-socket servers, not because they need the compute capability, but because they need more I/O and/or memory capacity than what is available on current single-socket servers.

AMD is helping address these problems by making energy efficiency a core design tenant of our processor architecture and with intelligent power management. The newly launched AMD EPYC processor enables no-com- promise 1-socket servers with up to 32 cores, 8 memory channels and 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes enabling capabilities and performance previously available only in 2-socket architectures. The ‘Performance per watt” benchmark of EPYC is unparalleled to any other processor available in the market. With EPYC, the world’s leading data center providers can further reduce their power consumption.

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INTELLIGENT cOMPuTING | CloUD Karan Kirpalani

ERP on Cloud Is Fast Moving To The Mainstream

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he movement of cloud ERP to the mainstream seems to be global. Analysts expect the global cloud ERP market to grow rapidly, with market size projections varying between USD 25 bn to USD 30 bn over the next four or five years.

While the concept has been around for some time, organizational mindsets towards cloud based ERP have changed dramatically of late, and in the last 18-24 months we have seen widespread adoption of ERP on the cloud – whether it’s Microsoft Dynamics / Navision, or SAP HANA / ECC on HANA. A number of factors are responsible for this shift.

Much Of ThE aPPLIcaTION EcOSYSTEM IS aLREadY ON ThE cLOud

Cloud-based applications are steadily replacing on- premise legacy systems across the entire spectrum of business processes – customer-facing web applications, CRM, HRM, documentation, reporting and analytics, project management, are applications that are steadily being migrated from on-premise environments to the Cloud.

In fact, organizations that may have already moved these

‘less mission-critical’ web-centric applications into the cloud, it makes great sense to have their ERP follow suit to ensure minimum latency between applications, improve

Organizational mindsets towards cloud based ERP have changed

dramatically of late, and in the last 18-24 months we have seen widespread

adoption of ERP on the cloud

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INTELLIGENT cOMPuTING | CloUD

roadblocks when CIOs and CSPs discuss security and performance in the Cloud. Developments in security technology and increasing customer awareness have seen cli- chéd security concerns largely addressed.

CIOs are now content to validate a CSP’S credentials, ensure adequate SLAs around uptime, security and performance, and then plunge in. This is a sound strategy provided you have (a) adequately validated the CSPs credentials within the community and (b) ensured that you’ve signed a contract that truly affords you with the benefits of the Cloud – pay-per-use, no lock-ins, elasticity, and access to a wide range of that can be consumed a-la-carte.

These fundamentals remain the same regardless of the application that’s moving into the cloud. Sure, a mission- critical application like ERP would involve greater due diligence than something peripheral like say, HR, but the basic requirements remain largely the same.

CSPs are providing new-generation services like SAP HANA in an on-demand, flexible, pay-per-use model that allows organizations to accelerate their time to market without having to invest up front in complex hardware and software licenses. CSPs like Netmagic offer a SAP HANA ‘TDI’ (Tailored Datacenter Integration, a fancy name for what is essentially an on-demand, pay-per-use SAP HANA model that select CSPs can offer after being certified by SAP to do so) model alongside the more traditional HANA Appliance model, thus allowing customers the option of going the appliance route, the Cloud route, or a Hybrid amalgamation of both.

Customers with existing ERP deployments can leverage additional capacity on by using Cloud extensions to add to existing capabilities seamlessly and without being bound to long term contracts. Of course, a mission- critical application like ERP would involve greater due diligence and security controls compared to a peripheral application. However, best-in-class CSPs today more than adequately address enterprise concerns around security, availability, integration and configurability, even for complex, mission critical applications like ERPs.

The benefits of ERP on cloud, of course, are significant.

Cloud-based ERPs are proving to be much ahead of on- premise ERPs in many other areas such as scalability, upgrades and time-to-market. With better user experiences, seamless upgrades and extended features like mobile compatibility, cloud-based ERP deployments are catch- ing up quickly with their on-premise counterparts.

(The author is Associate Vice President- Product and Services, Netmagic (An NTT Communications Company) analytics and reporting, leverage common security proto-

cols and drive greater cost and performance efficiencies.

And while it still makes sense for some applications to stay on-premise (for cost, compliance, or legacy reasons) it’s equally sensible to move web-enabled applications to the cloud. Working with a CSP that provides a seamless, extensible Hybrid Cloud allows customers the best of both worlds.

uNdERSTaNdING ThaT PROcESS STaNdaRdIZaTION ENaBLES EVOLuTION

When we talk about process standardization, it’s important to understand the distinction between cloud-based ERPs (such as typically offered by SaaS providers like Salesforce and Azure) versus legacy ERP applications that are now cloud-ready. The former involves a wholesale adoption of your Cloud ERP provider’s processes and systems, while the latter allows organizations to maintain a large amount of autonomy and customization in their processes and workflows while still being able to leverage benefits of the Cloud.

Both approaches come with their own individual set of benefits and constraints, but business leaders are quickly realizing that process transformation or standardization is a small price to pay to ensure that their business models evolve quickly and keep up with market dynamics. The benefit of operational agility, cost efficiencies and technology access outweigh the initial pain of having to migrate from legacy systems.

a STRONGER, MORE cREdIBLE cSP EcOSYSTEM Leading ERP companies are playing their part by certifying CSPs and OEMs. For many organizations, certified architecture gives them the much needed assurance from their CSP’s on availability, security, compliance and performance. With a stronger, more reliable and vendor-supported CSP infrastructure, organizations have started migrating mission-critical applications like ERP into the Cloud.

CIOs are now content to validate a CSPs credentials, ensure adequate SLAs around uptime, security and performance, and then plunge in. This is a sound strategy provided you have (a) adequately validated the CSPs credentials within the community, and (b) ensured that you’ve signed a contract that truly affords you with the benefits of the cloud – pay-per-use, no lock-ins, elasticity, and access to a wide range of that can be consumed a-la-carte.

cLOud-BaSEd ERP haS PROVEN BENEfITS, aNd fEWER cONcERNS TOdaY

Over the last two years we’ve seen fewer conversational

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INTELLIGENT cOMPuTING | oUtSiDe view Sanjay upadhyay

Hybrid IT -

5 Best Practices for cIOs

O

fficial marching orders are consistently imposed on CIOs and IT leaders. This is because we live in an era of exponential change driven not only by advances in technologies, but also by how these technologies are combined such as multiple cloud solutions integrated into existing IT systems - a hybrid IT setup.

Although CIOs are still expected to simplify and upgrade IT and improve security, they are also expected to focus on customer acquisition, and retention, as well as lead product innovation and collaborate on customer initiatives.

In parallel, dependence on technology also means there is very little room for the slightest interruption in operations.

Kevin Vasconi, Executive Vice President and CIO of Domino’s Pizza says, “The role of CIO is changing…but it’s difficult at times — like having to run two different businesses.” This is because CIOs are having more involvement with top management, and more interaction with customers, covering both strategic and functional roles.

IT investments in tech initiatives need to continue. Cloud computing has helped many enterprises transform IT practices over the past five years. AWS started the cloud computing wave when it launched in 2006. Since then, the cloud became an established reality. Organizations focused on cloud-first strategies because they accepted

Hybrid IT is an approach to enterprise computing in which an organization

provides and manages information technology resources in-house but uses

cloud - based services for others

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INTELLIGENT cOMPuTING | oUtSiDe view

their organizational requirements. There needs to be a balance with operational challenges that may arise such as managing both traditional and cloud IT, balancing various on-premises and off-premises suppliers, as well as making dynamic choices about technology since the business consistently requires new capabilities. If we are not able to do this, the promised cost-effectiveness will not materialize, and overall spending will increase as a result of moving arbitrary applications to an “external cloud provider.”

Therefore, enabling hybrid IT really comes down to delivering business value.

Transformative efforts to create modern, hybrid IT - cloud, infrastructure, automation cannot be approached as a typical IT implementation. A defined, detailed vision, justification, and plan that defines the investments and justifies how results will be obtained and measured to get necessary sponsorship, stakeholder alignment, and resources, is needed.

With that in mind, here are 5 best practices for CIOs:

1

Strategic planning and setting realistic goals:

Review organization’s approach to end-to-end service management and service integration. It is necessary to understand the importance of developing a unified management model for cloud and non-cloud / on-premise services. Though it is not unusual, there are factors to consider to address efficiency and constraints.

For example, it’s important to know what applications can be successfully migrated and run in which environments and where a particular set of data is allowed to reside.

As further example, mission-critical environments and confidential data may not be choices for the cloud, and depending on your industry, regulatory requirements may prevent you from considering the cloud entirely.

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data security remains a major concern: With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, CIOs need to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments.

With a well-defined plan, server management products the cloud as a platform for innovation, necessary for

gaining competitive advantage. This quickly evolved and further combined with data analytics and Internet of Things (IoT).

Today, the market is providing hybrid services, and hybrid IT is becoming standard enterprise model. On one side, there are startup organizations without past capital investments in hardware utilizing the public cloud with the security and comfort of private cloud. On the other side, hybrid IT appears to be the choice for businesses that need to manage the transition to the cloud without discarding their current in-house infrastructure. To stay ahead, technology organizations are evolving from delivering technology to brokering services from multiple external and internal sources.

It is the role of CIO to help navigate change. If CIOs are service brokers, then they need to spend less time on technology underpinnings and more on integrating and delivering services from multiple internal and external sources in the most cost-effective and timely manner.

Bobby Cameron, an analyst at Forrester Research, says,

“It is the notion that you don’t need to know what is underneath. You should be able to take an application interface, combine it with other tools and deliver sophisticated services on top of any technology stack.”

Technology managers have always believed that standardization is critical to effective IT services delivery.

However, in the hybrid world, IT must be able to glue together as many disparate technology components as needed to deliver a service effectively and securely.

Therefore, for hybrid, success is more about the interchange between different technology components than it is about technology standards.

Hybrid IT is an approach to enterprise computing in which an organization provides and manages information technology resources in-house but uses cloud - based services for others. The hybrid approach also allows an enterprise to maintain a centralized approach to IT governance eliminating redundant functions and maintaining unified vision while experimenting with cloud computing.

The key forces driving adoption of hybrid IT are:

l An enterprise needs to maintain control of data l Cost effectiveness of cloud components such as Software as a Service and Storage as a service

l Desire for IT department to respond as quicily as possible to rapidly changing business needs

The key forces mentioned provide flexibility, scalability, and agility. However, to capitalize on this environment, IT teams must spend time creating a strategy that matches

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which are aimed at helping with out of the box monitoring, configuration, protection, provisioning to implement automation, will be effective. Determine and implement standards that are supported for the security of data in transit. Investing in solutions that offer real-time threat management assessment focusing on vulnerability, end- point security, and advanced anti-malware are necessary.

Bullet-proofing end-point security means creating the comprehensive strategy for securing each individual system. Running network inventory you would know exactly what is on the network in terms of applications, services, and data. This would be a critical step towards achieving an end to end security. With this information, you can decide what’s allowed on the network, how to spot untrusted applications, and what to do with anything running that is not company approved.

3

Plan phased approach: Rollout changes in stages.

Each stage should have defined metrics and goals that must be met moving forward. During a phased approach, CIOs can also explore colocation services to increase the flexibility of infrastructure. Companies are not moving wholesale to the cloud. Their migration plans usually involve multiple geographically diverse clouds.

Colocation, therefore, becomes a central point to inter- connect and offer centralized systems. Take note the

phased approach is not only to ensure the hybrid implementation is done correctly, but it is also key to building trust and buy-ins from the executive management team, and end users.

4

cost containment: This is a top initiative for every CIO. They are asked to reduce costs and improve performance, therefore necessary to review short- term and long-term cost savings and ROI. They will be involved in complex multi-vendor management scenarios.

Vendors will also offer various pricing and consumption

plans. Implementation of multi-cloud monitoring and budgeting tools providing single dashboard views spanning multiple providers would be necessary.

5

assess Resource capabilities: In addition to assessing the environment, and technology, ensure to assess resource capabilities required for hybrid IT

implementation, data migration, and management. This is a very complex environment and requires expertise across various areas such as networking, storage, virtualization, data security, data storage, and management. High degree of technology integration skills is required to understand different tools, application interfaces, and vendor management.

(The author is Director, IT Operations, RingZero Networks based out of Thailand)

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dIGITaL ENTERPRISE | FoCUS

DQ Bureau

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in dIGITaIGITaIGIT L ENTERPRISE | FoCUS

DQ Bureau

Hype Cycle for cloud Security in 2017

A

s we go by the recently released ‘Hype Cycle for Cloud Security for 2017’, it reveals interesting trends. “Security continues to be the most commonly cited reason for avoiding the use of public cloud,” said jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner. “Yet paradoxically, the organizations already using the public cloud consider security to be one of the primary benefits.” The attack resistance of the majority of cloud service providers has not proven to be a major weakness so far, but customers of these services may not know how to use them securely. “The Hype Cycle can help cybersecurity professionals identify the most important new mechanisms to help their organizations make controlled, compliant and economical use of the public cloud,” added Heiser.

The Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Cloud Security helps security professionals understand which technologies are ready for mainstream use, and which are still years away from productive deployments for most organizations. Hype Cycle is a graphical depiction of a common pattern that arises with each new technology or other innovation. Each year, Gartner creates more than 90 Hype Cycles in various domains as a way for clients to track technology maturity and future potential. The five phases in the Hype Cycle are Technology Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity.

aT ThE PEaK

The peak of inflated expectations is a phase of over

enthusiasm and unrealistic projections, where the hype is not matched by successful deployments in mainstream use. This year the technologies at the peak include data loss protection for mobile devices, key management as-a- service and software-defined perimeter. Gartner expects all of these technologies will take at least five years to reach productive mainstream adoption.

IN ThE TROuGh

When a technology does not live up to the hype of the peak of inflated expectations, it becomes unfashionable and moves along the cycle to the trough of disillusionment. There are two technologies in this section that Gartner expects to achieve mainstream adoption in the next two years:

disaster recovery as a service (draaS: This is in the early stages of maturity, with around 20-50 percent market penetration. Early adopters are typically smaller organizations with fewer than 100 employees, which lacked a recovery data center, experienced IT staff and specialized skills needed to manage a DR program on their own.

Private cloud computing: This is used when organi- zations want to the benefits of public cloud — such as IT agility to drive business value and growth — but aren’t able to find cloud services that meet their needs in terms of regulatory requirements, functionality or intellectual property protection. The use of third-party specialists for building private clouds is growing rapidly because the cost and complexity of building a true private cloud can be high.

Rapid growth in cloud adoption is driving

increased interest in securing data, applications and workloads says Gartner Hype cycle

INTELLIGENT cOMPuTING | FoCUS

DQ Bureau

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dIGITaL ENTERPRISE | FoCUS dIGITaIGITaIGIT L ENTERPRISE | FoCUS

ON ThE SLOPE

The slope of enlightenment is where experimentation and hard work with new technologies are beginning to pay off in an increasingly diverse range of organizations. There are currently two technologies on the slope that Gartner expects to fully mature within the next two years:

Data loss protection (DLP): This is perceived as an effective way to prevent accidental disclosure of regulated information and intellectual property. In practice, it has proved more useful in helping identify undocumented or broken business processes that lead to accidental data disclosures, and providing education on policies and procedures. Organizations with realistic

expectations find this technology significantly reduces unintentional leakage of sensitive data. It is relatively easy, however, for a determined insider or motivated outsider to circumvent.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) : A container encryption is a way for organizations to protect their data held with cloud providers. It’s a similar approach to encrypting a hard drive on a laptop, but it is applied to the data from an entire process or application held in the cloud. This is likely to become an expected feature offered by a cloud provider and indeed Amazon already provides its own free offering, while Microsoft supports free BitLocker and DMcrypt tools for Linux.

REachEd ThE PLaTEau

Four technologies have reached the plateau of productivity, meaning the real-world benefits of the technology have been demonstrated and accepted. Tokenization, high-assurance hypervisors and application security as a service have all moved up to the plateau, joining identity-proofing services which was the only entrant remaining from last year’s plateau.

“Understanding the relative maturity and effectiveness of new cloud security technologies and services will help security professionals reorient their role toward business enablement,” said He- iser. “This means helping an organization’s IT users to procure, access and manage cloud services for their own needs in a secure and efficient way.”

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ibrahim ahmad

ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in

—VanITha naRaYanan Chairperson, IBM India dIGITaL ENTERPRISE | talking Point

ibrahim ahmad

ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in

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A

s the cloud rat race heats up in the tech industry, IBM is talking of cognitive technologies and how its cloud is intelligent and agile. So let’s begin with cognitive. What according to you are the key components of this cognitive era?

IBM’s tryst with AI goes back in time- almost 5 decades ago. Our scientists used to work on a language called LISP, so AI as a discipline is not new to IBM. Over the years computing power has grown in leaps, we have ac- cumulated humongous amounts of data, and we have many path-breaking technologies from deep learning to analytics et al. Today it is all about a technology ecosystem. We are manifesting AI via Watson and augmenting lives in more ways than one - our cognitive play stitches together multiple technologies, yet thinks like a human and constantly improvises it. In 1956, if IBM had built a cognitive platform, it might have resembled a mainframe at that point of time. With all the capabilities that we have today, Cognitive is also morphing to the new normal-like Watson on a cloud. This has opened up new frontiers and hence available anywhere to anyone. It’s a platform to develop a technology ecosystem. If we go back in our history, the System 360 was probably the first core platform that fostered this ecosystem approach. There were people who did the networking for the mainframe, software for the mainframe and then we saw a whole lot of companies doing services for the mainframe. This was one ecosystem build up, but fast forward again to the 21st century, this ecosystem is going to look very different, because in those ecosystems you need to have syn- chronized relationships. There are multiple things - and that is why we call this a cognitive era.

Look at the programming era that lasted for 5 decades.

We are taking Watson to the mainstream.

You are taking Watson’s intelligence and smartness to your customers with your cloud. how does it make a difference?

Our intent is to build systems to augment humans. We will be very transparent in ensuring that people know what ‘data’ trained the system and also when people bring customers, particularly in our case we have so many enterprise customers who are using the platform;

they are going to get the value from the data.

So essentially my question is that how this change is going to be different than the previous changes that technology companies like IBM have facilitated and brought in? So, if you look at most of the prior technology trends, most of them relate to efficiency, productivity, and you were able to do more with higher computing capacity, more storage, and programming to a certain set of an outcome. They were programmed to a certain scenario and that we solved. For instance, “I want to run a campaign and that campaign is going to run on these metrics. I want to have these operational KPIs, I am going to program so that, I am able to get these KPIs delivered.” So now, the fundamental technological difference about cognitive is that you are building a system that will learn and that will pick up a pattern that we may not have picked up earlier. In that sense, we are directing and you are feeding the system and you are contextualizing it in many different domain centric ways.

Who would be some of the early adopters that you think would go in for this approach of technology?

We have seen this across sectors and we have seen this in different places. We clearly are seeing early adoption from startups and new companies. They are looking at these technologies because now for the first time probably in

In a freewheeling conversation with Dataquest, IBM India Chairperson, Vanitha Narayanan, talks about the Big Blue’s cognitive cloud; and demystifies how Watson and quantum computing add more punch for the user. Excerpts

THE CLOUD PUNCH

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the history of technology, you have access. So, innovative entrepreneur individuals who are digitally tech savvy are leveraging cognitive technology. Particularly if they see a compelling problem that they want to solve, they are able to adopt and embrace. They don’t have to worry about transformation. It’s not only in the development of the new product and solution but it is also in the distribution.

Because now instead of the intermediate economy, you have distribution cost. So your initial capital cost and distribution cost has gone down. You have new ways of distributing, and maybe it’s a better way or alternate way to look at it or until you figure out.

Now that you said that Watson is sitting on IBM’s cloud, can you give a peek into innovation happening on the Watson out of India?

Overall if you look at innovation, we as a company, which has been in tech area for a long time, invention and innovation are sort of integral to how our labs and everything runs around that. One of the things that we track very diligently is patents. In 2016, India labs contributed over 650 patents overall. The patents were in the realm of our strategic areas like cloud, cognitive, security etc. So clearly, the innovation culture is alive and kicking.

IBM is also talking about quantum computing – can you demystify that for us, and what is it doing in your cloud?

In the larger computing world we live in a world of ones and zeros. But in the world of quantum computing, there is one, zero, or both. So the moment you do both,the possibilities become exponential. You have to have quantum chips; we have put them in the cloud. We made

it available to the companies and research institutes globally and we have just commercialized it.

how competitive IBM cognitive cloud? Is it affordable?

It is today, and it will continue to be. There are multiple communities that are adopters. But let’s talk about two.

One is a community of startups and SME’s that can today be ‘born in the cloud’. So, with a smart cognitive cloud they don’t have to migrate. If you are a small component manufacturer for instance, you can get ERP on the cloud, you can get everything on the cloud and you don’t have to worry about having an affordable person who is running servers. Particularly, when you the overall national push for digital payments, the push to GST and so on, this makes a lot of business and operational sense. So, now you also have these other trends in the country that is forcing everybody to move out of pockets of islands of the analog world. It’s no longer about choice. This is also a good way of saying that I am an auto part manufacturer, why do I need to go via an IT person - I am just going straight.

Startups are very different in the IT adoption attitude.

One apprehension often cited is that the cloud, and a cloud packed with cognitive strengths, will hit jobs. In a country where we need to create more jobs, is this not a matter of concern?

Well, we are delivering our cognitive cloud it as an open ecosystem where hundreds or thousands of ecosystems partners who are providing their services or offerings can create many things. So, in that sense, you are not just going to have a few large companies creating all the jobs. You would see a lot more jobs created in a broader ecosystem.

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INTELLIGENT cOMPuTING | event rePort MaLaViKa SaCCHDeVa

malavikas@cybermedia.co.in

Smart Data Center Optimizes all aspects Of IT Operations

H

itachi recently hosted NEXT 2017 event in Las Vegas and announced its new business entity Hitachi Vantara to leverage the broad portfolio of innovation, development and experience from across Hitachi Group companies to deliver data- driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises.

This new company will unify the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business as Hitachi Vantara to capitalize on Hitachi’s social innovation capability in both operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT).

Hitachi Vantara envisions Smart Data Center as the ul- timate approach to optimize all aspects of IT operations across data centers, reduce cost, manage risk and increase agility to respond to business change. According to Gary Breder, Director of cloud and services product marketing, few years back data centers was the most important thing in the organization. But with time the company realized that they need software for that instead of hardware. Therefore we have shifted from the hardware to software.

This Smart Data Center approach makes IT more agile by automating processes and centralizing control that span systems, clouds and data centers. Smart Data Center is very different from traditional IT administration. It automates decision-making, insight and guidance through predictive analytics, IoT and prescriptive intelligence. These advanced capabilities centralize the management of IT infrastructure for simple as well as complex operations.

ThE SMaRT daTa cENTER INcLudES:

l Speeds time to deploy IT resources and complete ad- ministrative tasks

l Streamlines changing and adding new infrastructure technology

l Provides holistic, dynamic data center operational and commercial views, on-demand for data-driven decision- making, risk management and planning

l Maximizes operational efficiency and cost reduction l Improves business alignment and consistent delivery of service levels

“We have introduced updates on the existing Hitachi’s cloud offerings which will help our customers to use public cloud. The company has also launched new offering from Hitachi Enterprise Container plug point. It is designed for those companies which started on the internet”, he added.

Breder concluded by saying that we try to strike the right balance between customization and standardization. We don’t want our customers to buy more than what they need. Therefore we have created different models for different kind of businesses.

Hitachi’s new business entity Hitachi Vantara will leverage the broad

portfolio of innovation, development and experience from across Hitachi

group companies

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Mohit Bhishikar

CIOs Have To Re-Imagine how They Work and create Workplaces

D

igital disruption is rapidly changing the role of CIOs. The disruption caused by digital is both an opportunity and challenge for a CIO.

It is important to understand the world we live in today. There are several macro level shifts that are changing the way we work, live, learn and play. Here’s

looking at the top five best practices for CIOs, enabling them to lead this transformative digital journey.

dIGITaL REadINESS

We are living in a very dynamic business environment shaped by a fast-changing digital technology landscape.

Top 5 best practices for CIOs to unbundle the digital complexities and

create a roadmap and lead the digital transformation journey

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brace the change as well. New talent with the latest digital technology expertise needs to be added to their payrolls while existing ones are scaled. The company structure also needs to evolve to help their employees learn new skills and grow in the organization.

The IT industry is also transforming processes and is now rapidly scaling up existing technologies to work in tandem with the ongoing digital revolution to transition into a digital entity smoothly. This evolution is creating new jobs with expertise in software and hardware innovations by redesigning, rethinking and rehashing their manufacturing processes. The sector is embedding digitalization and perfecting the skills in the sector to bring a global spotlight to the Indian IT sector through differenti- ating innovations. This derives the need for the workforce to change their thought processes too and imbibe disruptive as well as incremental innovation at the core of their work. Meanwhile, companies need to step in to empower their mass workforce to experiment more and create innovations that would be in line with the aim of becoming a leader in their field with a differentiated product.

It is therefore imperative for CIOs to build full-stack competencies and specialist IT skills to ensure that the workforce can effectively move along with the organization as it charts new digital territories.

PLacING IOT aT ThE cENTRE Of ThE cOMPaNY Internet of Things (IoT) goes beyond fanciful connected devices. It is the whole process of collecting data embedded in a range of machines, wearables, vehicles and our overall work environment. Considering we are functioning amidst an all-engulfing digital explosion, it should be a CIO’s priority to identify, ascertain and then accelerate roll out of IoT-led opportunities.

Globally, IoT has seen deployments across Transporta- tion, Utilities, Retail, Logistics and Security. Over the next decade, a huge adoption of IoT is expected across sectors. It is anticipated to bring billions of data-generating devices online and connect the vast stream of data with people, processes and other devices. Applications for smart city, smart vehicles, asset tracking, home automation, smart factory, etc. are going to witness massive adoption and implementation. More than 50% of world’s population and things will be online and connected to each other by 2020.

IoT and robots have a huge potential in India and soon will become a basic requirement for enterprises. However, for the massive adoption of IoT, a host of things need to be in place such as the sensor ecosystem, security and privacy standards, domain applications, content as well Going virtual, mobile, and social are three mega trends

that are creating a world of opportunities for organizations to effectively and efficiently connect with their customers, employees and ecosystem partners. Today, it is becoming imperative for organizations to adopt digital strategies across their operations not just for cutting costs but also to increase employee productivity, bring in process efficiencies and most importantly, to engage better with their audience.

As the pace of digitalization increases, so does the companies’ need to adopt or upgrade their digital involvement. Under any given situation, one of the top-most priorities for a CIO should be to prepare an organization to participate and sustain itself during its transformation. In an eco-system built around contemporary, connected technologies, it is mandatory to shake the foundation of legacy business models to usher in new-age digital business models.

Many enterprises still hold back from completely em- bracing digital due to a lack of awareness and security.

There is an ambiguity across several levels including technology competency, costs of digital deployment, digital architecture stack, etc.

CIOs need to work more closely with the organizations to create awareness and educate enterprises about digital benefits and their potential to bring about a transformation across industries.

uPSKILLING ThE WORKfORcE

Moving to digital business eco-systems requires a specific set of IT capabilities. CIOs have repeatedly identified the lack of technology skills to be one of the biggest barriers in the way of digitalization. Upskilling has long evolved from being just a choice. Today, it is a necessity for the incoming generation of employees as well as the existing ones. As the pace of digitization will not pause, it is imperative that a continued, uninterrupted and rapid upskilling done for the employees so that the company can em-

Moving to digital business eco-

systems requires a specific set

of IT capabilities. CIOs have

repeatedly identified the lack of

technology skills to be one of

the biggest barriers in the way

of digitalization

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as uniform standards. The government and industry players need to work together to ensure that the ecosystem performs to its true potential. Initiatives like Digital India and Smart Cities will certainly drive adoption of this technology across industries in the coming years.

BuSINESS aLIGNMENT

India’s ever-expanding digital landscape allowed Indian companies to get ahead of the global curve in embedding technology into their business functions. Whether it’s big data analytics, knowledge management or even efficient digital-enabled processes and services, many are reaping the benefits of smart technology adoption. This focus on technology has also brought about a fundamental change in the companies’ DNA. Technology specialists, in the form of a Chief Information Officer are playing an increasingly important role in strategic decision making, and are increasingly considered among the top three decision makers in a company. Information Technology has moved on from being a support function to a strategic one.

Top performing CIOs always echo their CEO’s prima- cies, with a dedicated emphasis on business growth and digitalization. Working with different business units, meet- ing their needs, catering to their priorities and an overall business alignment continues to be one of the top most best practices for a CIO.

The increasing importance of technology has altered hiring trends even in traditional sectors, who are increasingly creating more technology positions across verticals to integrate the digital big picture into existing structures.

This trend will only increase over the foreseeable future, as companies embed digital in their DNA.

cuSTOMER ExPERIENcE

CIOs need to go beyond ‘customer centricity’ and start talking ‘customer experience’ instead. There should be an obsessive focus on experience because – 75% of the consumers entering the market by 2025 will be digital natives. They will demand the same experience which were exposed to while growing up. Their loyalty will be driven by the experience they get while interacting through different channels.

Today’s markets are highly competitive and are shrink- ing due to dynamic digital technologies. It is imperative for CIOs to be able to spot the tiniest of customer gripes and drill down their challenges. New media has enabled consumers to instantly connect with one another, compare, analyze and finally decide on their purchasing decisions.

The ability to receive real-time feedback from anywhere in the world has drastically altered consumer behavior. This has also narrowed down the window businesses have in hand to address customer grievances. Under such active situations, it is crucial for CIOs to be in constant touch with consumers and understand the factors that drive their buying behavior. In-time technology upgrades en- hancing customer experience can go a long way in building and sustaining a loyal consumer base.

In the context of these transitions, CIOs will have to re- imagine how they work and create workplaces and mar- ketplaces for the digital natives. They must undertake a much more immersive role in the overall play of operations in an enterprise. The new trends are persuading the CIOs across different verticals to think seriously about the next generation capabilities necessary for personal, corporate and marketplace consumption.

(The author is CIO at Tata Technologies)

The IT industry is also

transforming processes and is now rapidly scaling up

existing technologies to work in

tandem with the ongoing digital

revolution to transition into a

digital entity smoothly

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dIGITaL ENTERPRISE | innovation Shrikanth G

Time Is Now To End Innovation Myopia

Are you innovating enough to survive the new normal- is your thinking and action non-linear? What is your R&D orientation? The answers to these and related questions unravels an organisation’s innovation quotient

“Not only has the basis of computing changed, the basis of competition has changed too”

– andrew S. Grove in Only the Paranoid Survive

A

ndy Grove wrote that couple of decades back, but it beautifully, in a nutshell, defines the state of IT industry at this point in time. The traditional IT outsourcing models are aging and losing sheen by the day and its time to re-invent IT with focused innovation strategies to stay in the race.

The computing industry is on the cusp of things. Many companies are struggling to make up for the lost growth and revenues as the industry by and large was caught in a disruptive nexus of forces that has manifested in an alphabet soup of abbreviations – ranging from IoT to SDN et al. Let’s go to the core question: What ails growth?

Beyond the sluggish economy, it’s the lack of innovation that’s slowing down things.

EVERYONE RIdES ThE INNOVaTION BaNdWaGON Most technology leaders you meet today lip syncs ‘In-

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dIGITaL ENTERPRISE | innovation

Alibaba joins the Top 10 most innovative companies list.

Annual worldwide corporate R&D spending broke through

$700bn in annual investment, according to an annual analysis of R&D spending across 1000 global public companies by PwC’s Strategy& study.”

ThE MESSaGE IS cLEaR ON ThE WaLL

Innovate or perish. The IT services companies need to be prepared for this change. For instance, the above study further said that large multi-national companies report that they expect the focus of their innovation efforts and investments to change significantly over the next decade – moving toward a far greater emphasis on riskier initiatives and breakthrough innovations.

“It’s been a year of highs and lows for R&D. Record levels of investment, next to unprecedented drops in novation’. But very little is said about what are they inno-

vating? or How is it manifesting at ground zero? Particu- larly, when you look at an industry like IT outsourcing, in which every vendor has a global sourcing model- but at the end of the day, it’s a model each one struggles to differentiate.

So if you ask the IT service providers- what is your In- novation Quotient (IQ), the chances are you might not get a lucid answer- because most of the jobs they do are still linear. But sadly, the IT outsourcers here in this part of the world are measured only based on their stock and quar- terly performance and many fail to look at parameters like in what ways they have innovated IT organizations with their services or how much they invested in R&D or creating CoEs and stuff like that.

But now the time has come wherein IT organizations are demanding more innovation from services providers, hence it is imperative they raise their bar by providing ‘In- novation Benchmarks’ in order to transition to the next orbit. That leads to the critical question: Are Indian IT Out- sourcers prepared for this change?

The answer is by and large a very fudgy one you get.

For instance, I asked a leading IT industry CEO this question, and he gave a typical reply: “ The answer to your question is a ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. I left it with that, as probing further will only yield such ‘politically correct’

ambiguous answers.

All said and done this process of innovation the industry has been talking for years. And if you look at the IT industry, the only way innovation can come about is non-linear innovation- wherein the emphasis is more on IP, products, platforms, service excellence et al as against the ‘time and material’ model. But we need to accept the fact that IT services in India is still mired in linearity and it will take a while for non-linearity to kick in and every company’s dream is to grow its non-linear revenues.

INNOVaTION INSIGhTS: ThE R&d EdGE

Given this back drop, if we seek some answers on innovation, a Strategy& study provides some pointers. Strat- egy& - part of PwC Network in its 2017 Global Innova- tion 1000 study said, “Annual worldwide R&D spending breaks through $700bn for the top 1000 corporate R&D spenders for the first time. Almost 25% of executives sur- veyed reported having already experienced some pres- sure to change how or where they conduct innovation.

Amazon is the world’s largest corporate spender on R&D at over $16bn. Alphabet surpasses Apple, according to a global survey of R&D executives, as the most innovative company and for the first time a Chinese company,

2017 GLOBaL INNOVaTION 1000

The Strategy& Global Innovation 1000 study analyses spending at the world’s 1000 largest publicly listed corporate R&D spenders and is now in its 13th year

l Amazon is the largest spender on R&D in the Global Innovation 1000 study, the first time the top spender is a high tech firm. All top four spenders are high tech companies.

l Overall, Software & Internet industry companies continue to increase their year-on- year R&D spending, and the analysis shows that by 2018, Healthcare companies will surpass Computing & Electronics to become the largest industry in terms of R&D spending - the first time in 12 years of analysis.

l Overall, Computing & Electronics, Healthcare, and Automotive are the top three industry sectors and represented 61.3% of global R&D spending in 2017.

l Alphabet, Amazon, GE, IBM, and Microsoft all increased their ranking in the 10 Most Innovative Companies list, according to a global survey of R&D executives

R&D spending by companies based in China declined for the first time in the study, it increased in japan for the first time in 4 years and continued to grow moderately in North America.

Source: The Strategy& Global Innovation 1000