1. siliconindia
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siliconindia
PUBLISHED FROM BANGALORE
Business OF Technology IN THE U.S. & INDIA JULY - 2013 siliconindia.com
Company of the Month
Startup of the Month
In My Opinion:
JeffWeiner, LinkedIn
VCTalk: Kanwal Rekhi,
Inventus Capital Partners
CIO Insights: Walter Curd,
Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.
Premlesh Machama, MD, CareerBuilder-India
CareerBuilder:
HarshalKatre,Co-Founder&
CEO,ProfitBooks
PratulShroff,Founder&
CEO,eInfochips
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Contents July 2013
Cover Story
Page
16
[In My Opinion]
JeffWeiner,LinkedIn
[Venture Beat]
[VC Talk]
Managers Vs. Entrepreneurs
Kanwal Rekhi & Manu Rekhi,
Inventus Capital Partners
[CIO Insights]
The Usual Suspects are not
the Real Trends
Walter Curd,
Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.
Using Technology To Polish the
Pharmaceutical Industry
Arun Gupta, Cipla Limited
Kokilaben Hospital: Making
Patients Life Easier
Rajesh Batra, Kokilaben
Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital &
Medical Research Institute
[View Point]
E-Commerce: Power for
the Next Generation
Raj Subramaniam, FedEx Services
Managing Unstructured Data
Still Remains a Challenge
Santosh D’Souza, NetApp India
Data will Drive the Future
of Consumer Electronics
Vijay Solanki, Philips
Increasing Targeted Cyber Attacks
Making Enterprises Move Towards
Signature-Less Approach
Sridhar Jayanthi, FireEye
Silicon Intellectual Property:
Delivering Value to Customers
Chakravarthi M.G, Mobiveil
4G and its Pertinence in the
Indian Telecom Sector
Arvind Bali,
Videocon Mobile Services
Securing Confidence in
Mobile Transactions
LokeshSingh,Gemalto
[Company of the Month]
[Startup of the Month]
06
Premlesh Machama, MD,
CareerBuilder-India
CareerBuilder:
By Sandeep Sen
HarshalKatre,
Co-Founder&CEO,
ProfitBooks
PratulShroff,
Founder&CEO,
eInfochips
Judicious Engineering
Mohamed Ibrahim Enayathullah, MD
Pearson TalentLens
Sushil Eapen, Managing Director
SJS Technologies
B Sandeep Shetty, Director
Pavan Kumar Shetty, Director
Barracuda Networks
Niall King, Asia Pacific Regional
Vice President
SanDisk Corporation
Sanjay Mehrotra,
Co-Founder, President & CEO
10 42
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34
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T
here has always been a tug of
war between ‘Leadership’ and
‘Management’ for the top notch.
Even though they overlap each
other, they are not synonyms.
There is a huge difference
between two. With management,
you find people who tell you what to do but
leadership inspires others and inspiration to me is
the key. But now the question arises, “What does
it take to inspire others?” According to me, there
are three components to true inspiration.
1.ClarityofVision:
What help are you trying to take, what vision do you
have, what sense of purpose strides in your motivation,
and what do you see in other people that others are not
seeing? The clearer you can be about these, the more
easily you can understand a lot of people.
2.TheCourageforIntervention:
If you are a visionary, you are going to see
something that other people do not
see or feel threatened by because
it can potentially disrupt the
way they focus. You have
to believe in what you are
doing, you have to believe
in your vision which truly
every founder follows and
that conviction provides
courage to other people
to pursue the same
vision.
opinion
in my
GearuptoInspireand
MakeAnythingPossible
Founded in the living room of a co-founder in 2002, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), an online
professional network, was officially launched in May 2003. Headquartered in Mountain View,
California, the company has a market cap of $19.80 billion.
Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn
Jeff Weiner
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3.Abilitytocommunicatethe
requiredInformation:
To be able to evangelize to people in
a way they can easily understand what
you are trying to accomplish.
It is not so much about effective
leadership as it is about the kind of
talent I work for. My past experience
has helped me to learn about the kind
of people I would want to work with
in my team. Talking about the internet
industry, there are five key players on
the field. Today, technology is driving
the industry, advances innovation, and
supplies breakthroughs thus making it
important to have someone in the team
who understands technology and the
direction that the world is moving in.
The next thing you need is the ability to
harness where technology is going; you
need product sensibility. When groups
of people come together business
acumen and thought sensibility are the
absolute tools necessary to get things
done to take that technology and
actually motivate and inspire teams of
people.
The next quality of leadership is
to inspire people, but resourcefulness
is the most important of them all which
is needed to get things done. You are
going to run into walls where you will
need people in your team who can go
over those walls, go around those walls
orjustknockthemdownandgostraight
through. This is resourcefulness. It is
very rare to find such people. If you
find people with multiple skills, then
those are even better. However, if you
find people with all five; those are
the people that make the pantheon of
business - the ‘Steve Jobs’, the ‘Bill
Gates’, the ‘Jeff Bezos’ and others.
AreLeadersBorn?
We are all born with the resources
- words, deeds and ideals that can
inspire people. Words are powerful,
but there is nothing like talking the talk
and walking the talk. There are some
born with the ability to communicate
more effectively to channel things
that they are passionate about, and
there are others who just know how
to get things done as opposed to other
people who lead by example. We all
watch and get inspired by looking at
the way in which they do the things.
The later can be coached to cultivate
that skill set, even if it is not instinctive
or something that was inherent. To
begin with, they can practice it and
improve it over time. The same stand
for leading by your actions in terms of
getting things done, understanding the
culture of the organization and living
up to that culture, and aspiring to excel
to do better.
OrganizationalCulture
Imagineyouareinarocketandgoingto
launch it. If you are off by inches at the
launch, then you can be out by miles;
when you are out there because of the
sheer speed at which you are moving
at. It is very important to go from
situations to build from foundation.
What will ultimately trigger growth
are innovations and breakthroughs
along with the workforce flowing into
the company. One can easily predict
the success or failure of the company
looking at its team, process, and
physical infrastructure. Without these
elements, it is quite challenging to be
a scalable and sustainable one within
the industry.
According to me, culture
is collective personality in the
conversation, and not just who you
are but who you inspire to be. What
is critical for us in LinkedIn are
the operating principals we use to
make decisions and as sub-set of our
cultures. I would say LinkedIn culture
has four dimensions – transformation,
collaboration, team work and
results, and the most important for
us is transformation of individual
employees of LinkedIn to renovate the
trajectory of their career.
Passion,SkillandMarket
Few questions that I ask while
recruiting students, interns, folks
looking for career advice are what
should I be thinking about, what is
the most important dimension that I
should be contemplating on a career
path and what I am passionate about?
It is quite amazing to see how in-
frequently people ask these questions
to themselves. It is understood that
students who are just out of school
and have not experienced much do not
know what they want to do. But for
people who have been in the industry
for a long time, they fall prey to a whole
stream of opportunities and when they
wake up after 5-10 years, they do not
find the same passion igniting within
themselves.
I would advise the truly passionate
entrepreneurs to not just optimize for
passion, but to optimize both passion
and skill along with market. If you
find the convergence and nexus of
these three elements, you have got the
right timing and can make anything
possible.
(The article is based on the keynote
speech delivered at TiEcon, 2013
hosted at Santa Clara)
“
“
Itisvery
important
togofrom
situationsto
buildfrom
foundation
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C
loudByte, a provider of software defined storage in
the cloud, has raises its second round of funding to
the tune of Rs.24 crores, bringing the total funding
to Rs.35 Crores. The round was led by Fidelity Growth
Partners India, the private equity arm of Fidelity Worldwide
Investment (Fidelity), along-with existing investors Nexus
Venture Partners and Kae Capital. The company was founded
by Srivibhavan Balaram and Felix Xavier, who serve as the
COO and the CTO of the company respectively.
CloudByte plans to use the raised funds for expanding
globalsalesandmarketinginadditiontoproductdevelopment.
Additionally, Raul Rai, MD of Fidelity, will join the board of
directors for CloudByte.
The company’s ElastiStor storage technology, shipping
since January, and its applicability for both cloud storage
providers and enterprise private clouds had a huge role to
play in the investment decision. “It is refreshing to see what
CloudByte has accomplished in a short period of time and we
are looking forward to the company’s continued success and
expansion into new markets,” says Rai.
“We are building the next generation of storage
virtualization solution. The solution is disruptive and will
change the way storage is deployed and consumed in the cloud
- private and public. Our
management team is world
class in global technology
and business development,”
says Balaram.
There is a fundamental
shift in storage industry to
a cloud based model, giving
both cloud service providers
and enterprises the flexibility
and scale without betting a
lot of money. Recently, the
company appointed former
SanDisk General Manager
Greg Goelz as its Chief Executive Officer. CloudByte
ElastiStor has been verified to work with leading technology
platforms, including VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and
Citrix CloudPlatform, and is now integrated with OpenStack
block storage Cinder. The company has offices in California
and Bangalore.
CloudBytePockets
`24CroresinSeriesBFunding
FractalAnalyticsSecures
`150CroresfromTAAssociates
F
ractal Analytics, an
analytics service
provider, has raised
Rs.150 crores in funding
from private equity investor
TAAssociates.The company
is headquartered in Mumbai
and is led by Srikanth
Velamakanni. The company
plans to use the raised fund
for global expansion, hiring
and build more products
with intellectual property
rights. It had posted revenues of about Rs.120 crores in last fiscal
and eyeing for Rs.210 crores by the end of current fiscal.
“We are passionate about helping companies leverage
advanced analytics to better understand consumers, optimize
pricing and marketing, and compete more effectively in the
marketplace. Our partnership with TA will help us fuel this
passion further,” says Srikanth Velamakanni, CEO, Fractal
Analytics.
Founded in 2000 by former investment bankers Velamakanni
and Pranay Agrawal, Fractal Analytics currently has over 600
employees with offices in 7 cities across the globe. “With
exploding big data, there is a broad scope of big data and analytics
market, which includes data analytics, data distribution, data
management and data visualization amongst others and this is
the market we plan to tap into,” says Agrawal.
Fractal aims to work towards making analytics connect with
consumers to earn customer loyalty, make better incremental
decisions, and ultimately improve lives. The company helps
businesses understand, predict and influence consumer behavior;
improve marketing, pricing, supply chain, risk and claims
management; harmonize data, visualize information, build
dashboards and forecast business performance.
“We believe that the big data space represents a very
significant opportunity. Fractal is one of the leading players
in this space globally and has been experiencing accelerated
growth, making it the ideal company to partner with. We look
forward to working with the company’s management team to
further build value in Fractal,” says Naveen Wadhera, Director
and Country Head, TA Associates, who has joined the Fractal
board as a part of the deal.
Srivibhavan Balaram
Srikanth Velamakanni
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ManagersVs. EntrepreneursBy Kanwal Rekhi, Managing Director & Manu Rekhi, Principal, Inventus Capital Partners
Founded in 1993, Inventus Capital Partners is a U.S.-
India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs
and industry operating veterans who have financed over
100 entrepreneurs.
W
hat is the difference between a man-
ager and an entrepreneur? Is one bet-
ter for society than the other? These
are questions that frequently arise
during our mentoring sessions with
young college graduates who are at the beginning of their
professional careers.
Management, as a scientific discipline, and managers
as practitioners of it, are concerned with the control and
maximization of a firm’s resources. These resources may
include capital assets, human resource assets, customer
assets, and processes. Managers thrive in and prefer rela-
tively predictable and stable environments which enable
them to steadily and incrementally improve utilization,
nurture talent, cut costs, eliminate waste, and shorten
development cycle times to extract more profits from
same assets. That said, the ability for a manager to ef-
fect change in an organization is con-
strained by the inertia of his assets. A
five percent annual improvement in
productivity at a large industrial firm,
such as GE, is considered to be an ex-
tremely successful result.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand,
are innovators and disrupters who are
naturally antagonistic to the stable en-
vironment and incremental approach
espoused by managers; they have little
interest in maintaining the status quo
since they cannot effectively compete
against established players with well-
oiled processes. The individual entre-
preneur has no assets to start with and
moves quickly to adopt new approach-
es and aggressively tackle opportuni-
ties in new markets and can thus af-
ford to be disruptive as they have no
well-established assets to lose. In the
end, their advantage stems from the
speed with which they can move in
rapidly changing environments.
In many cases, the relationship
between entrepreneurs and manag-
ers is an adversarial one, fraught with
misunderstandings and caricatured
impressions of each other. Managers
look upon entrepreneurs as whimsical
Kanwal Rekhi
VC Talk
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and even capricious in their approach
to business, whereas entrepreneurs
view managers as stodgy, hidebound,
and potentially as impediments to
change.
The irony is that every success-
ful entrepreneur ends up creating as-
sets that need to be continuously kept
productive and optimized by someone
with managerial expertise. As a start-
up expands, the entrepreneur must
transform himself into a highly effec-
tive manager, otherwise he risks seri-
ous damage to his own business; but
that is very hard to do. As a firm starts
to grow rapidly, the founder’s skill set
has to expand at an even faster pace
to stay ahead of the business require-
ments. He has to learn new skills and
unlearn old ways of conducting busi-
ness which were better suited to a busi-
ness in its infancy. In most cases, it is
much more effective to hire a manager
to help manage the core of the busi-
ness while the entrepreneur pushes the
envelope at the fringes. As the compa-
ny matures, entrepreneurs often retire
or move back into the startup world.
In certain cases, the entrepreneurs and
their startups become acquisition tar-
gets by managers looking to induce
growth in large companies.
A well-balanced team of entre-
preneurs and experienced managers,
bound together through mutual re-
spect, can significantly propel an en-
terprise. At Google, Manu witnessed
this first hand with Eric Schmidt com-
ing in and acting as the company’s lead
manager through his role as CEO. The
founders, Larry and Sergey, continued
to focus on driving new technologies
and strategic relationships. Over the
years, Larry learned how to become a
better manager of the core businesses
without having to be at the reins and
disrupting the assets that he had cre-
ated. This type of symbiotic relation-
ship between experienced managers
and entrepreneurial visionaries is not
just unique to Google. Steve Jobs
would rely on Tim Cook to stream-
line the supply chain and operations
at Apple. Sheryl Sandberg brought
sales and organizational expertise to
Facebook while Mark Zuckerberg fo-
cused on executing his core product
vision. Going further back, Bill Gates
surrendered day-to-day management
responsibilities at Microsoft to Steve
Ballmer, so that he, himself, could fo-
cus on driving strategy and new tech-
nical efforts. The model has proven to
be an effective one in the technology
industry over the past two decades.
Unfortunately, when there is not
mutual respect and intellectual hon-
esty between the manager and en-
trepreneur the transition is usually
disastrous. At Exodus, Kanwal saw
billions of dollars in equity value dissi-
pate after Ellen Hancock was brought
in as CEO. She had little regard for
the founder and Chandrashekhar was
sidelined. Similarly at Apple, John
Scully had little regard for Steve Jobs.
Apple stagnated for more than a dec-
ade. Yahoo! also faced a similar fate.
If the incoming manager is led to be-
lieve that he is being brought in to fix a
problem they very quickly dismiss the
entrepreneur.
Ultimately, entrepreneurs are crea-
tors of new wealth in an economy
while managers are conservers of es-
tablished wealth. Society needs both
of them as one brings stability to the
environment while others add dy-
namism and fuel for expansion. An
economy full of managers without en-
trepreneurs is likely to stagnate while
an economy full of entrepreneurs
without managers is likely to be un-
stable. Japan, an economy entering a
third decade of economic stagnation,
is a prime example of the first while
Nigeria is a good example of the sec-
ond. In the U.S., on the other hand, we
have a healthy balance between the
two and so our economy is both rela-
tively productive and dynamic com-
pared to other nations.
It is much more
effective to hire a
manager to help
manage the core
of the business
while the entre-
preneur pushes
the envelope at
the fringes
“
“
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‘W
ork’ may not be a place to go to, but a thing to do in the near future. Our tasks may be recited
to us by a program, our kitchen may become our office and the office need not be a physical
place anymore. If twenty years ago, the only way to work was to sit behind a desk then it’s quite
possible to be in a future without any office space and to be recruited by a program instead of a headhunter.
The attitude towards work has taken a sharp turn and recruitment has become an even tougher business.
More workers are setting their own work hours, taking up contracts, and working remotely – the traditional
40 hours a week, jobs have faded out. Today, requirements in the industry are more specialized and recruiters
are forced to take up unorthodox ways to pull in prospective candidates. Social media, job portals and online
communities are all areas of recruitment for headhunters today. The market leaders in this domain have
understood this drastic shift in trends and have cashed in with mammoth resume databases and solutions. “But
in large part, the industry is far from being maximized,” says Premlesh Machama, MD, CareerBuilder India,
a prominent online job portal.
“We have not seen any innovation in the job portal category, job portals still offer resume database services”
says Machama. Having realized the need and an opportunity, CareerBuilder has invented a revolutionary
COVER STORY
17
Recruitment
Envisioningthe
Nexusof
Premlesh Machama, Managing Director
By Sandeep Sen
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to be the prime candidate for the job.
Dias for Smart Employers
With such varied areas of search and
thousands of portals which list out
candidates for a single position, a
recruiter’s job has become anything
but easy. With so many candidates
pouring out of colleges and schools
every year, it is quite easy for a
recruiter to overlook a valuable
candidate’sprofile.Toclearthiscloudy
maze, CareerBuilder has introduced
recruitment spaces specialized for
each vertical. Their database is acutely
tuned to offer search results which
are filtered to the last specification
entered by the recruiter. They achieve
this hair splitting task by introducing
sub categories for specialized resumes
and experienced professionals in
the industry. This vastly increases
the relevance of search results and
also decreases the cost of resources
deployed, for the employer by 18 -22
percent.
“With CareerBuilder, the
employers not only have a customized
search engine at their disposal but also
two equally game changing tools for
talent acquisition,” says Machama.
Work@ taps the age old resource of
employee referral but on the ultra-
modern social media platform of
Facebook. Hiring via referrals still
ranks first, according to staffing.org,
therefore it is not a method that can
be disposed of. Work@ is a simple
referral application that harnesses the
resources of the all-pervasive social
media platform. It allows employees to
share job listings with their Facebook
friends and considering the fact that an
average Facebook user has about 130
friends, widens the search parameters
exponentially.
Another innovative tool called
Talent Network has the ability to
revolutionize the entire process of job
listing in companies. This application
allows enterprises and companies to
create their own organizational page
on CareerBuilder where they can
post job offers, company highlights,
progress taking place within the
organization and more. This page is
also search engine optimized therefore
when a person is scouring for jobs,
he/she is automatically redirected
to this page and is introduced to the
organization. This not only eliminates
competition from other enterprises
that have similar job listings but it also
allows the company to tap another
huge well of resource called “passive
job seekers.” These are people who
are not aggressively looking for a
job but are open to possibilities. For
them exists a special tab within Talent
Network called Join the Network.
In plain sight, it is simply a process
of building a community around the
organization but from a recruiter’s
perspective it is the culmination of all
the aforementioned tools. This pool of
resource can prove highly beneficial
as it can serve as a reserve pool for
future opening and perhaps someday
be the foremost recruiting mode.
Stepping into the Subcontinent
The tools that this innovation driven
company offers are presented with a
vision for the future. CareerBuilder
came to India in 2007, with a vision to
disrupt the online recruitment industry,
but due to inauspicious year that
followed – 2008’s global economic
meltdown – they were forced to cut
down on operations. Not until 2012
did the Indian arm finally get the
go-ahead. Today, CareerBuilder has
introduced in India, all the tools that
have been tested and tried in the rest
of the world, with some of the biggest
names in the industry, and have led
to their large North American and
European dominance in this business.
The Indian arm of CareerBuilder
aims to revolutionize the recruitment
business in India to create bigger pools
of talent that are readily available to
head hunters and corporate recruiters
of today and tomorrow.
Their current operations in the
country are mainly focused on the
core aspects of recruitment i.e. resume
database sales and their new core
products which bring a breath of fresh
air into the whole business. Future in
the country for this giant looks quite
promising with the balance in their
favor as their inventive new products
and two click solutions will take the
job market by storm only to the delight
of job seekers and recruiters. However,
this is not the pinnacle of innovation
for this experienced player. Newer
products are under development and
will be rolled out soon. Perhaps with
this new player in town, our country’s
job market will see the light of day. As
the saying goes, “a step towards the
future is the way to build your career.”
product suite that will stir up a stagnant
market. With a domain experience
of over 18 years and unprecedented
dominance in North America and
Europe, CareerBuilder intends to
storm the Indian recruitment market
with its innovation driven philosophy
and solutions. With its fresh products
and social media integration,
CareerBuilder is poised to capture
the untapped market space. Despite
the fact that the market share in this
domain has already being dominated
by big players, CareerBuilder sees a
sweet spot that it can dominate from,
in online recruitment.
The products that this company
intends to introduce to the Indian
market are used by the Fortune 500
in Europe and America. Having
customized their products to serve
the Indian industry seamlessly,
CareerBuilder is just a step away from
market dominance. The company
entered the subcontinent in 2007 and
thus began their journey of well-
crafted innovation for an industry that
is in large part stagnated.
Current Innovations to ease Job
Seeker’s Conduit
Today, the modes of recruitment have
changed, both from the perspective of
the employer and the employee. Job
seekersapplyformultiplejobsatatime
but are largely unaware of the success
or failure of their application, until
the very last moment. “CareerBuilder
understands a job applicant’s pain.
Attending multiple interviews and
waiting for the verdict. It is a highly
stressful and testing process, and
we have tried to remedy that,” adds
Machama.
The primary method for job
seekers to find a job online is after
the long process of uploading the
CV and separately filling up multiple
forms, uploading picture and contact
details – all of which are already
included in the CV – only after that the
candidate begins to receive calls from
prospective employers. CareerBuilder
has eliminated all the base level
preliminary hassles that first time
applicants have to go through to apply
for a job offer, with their product CV@
CV. When an applicant submits his/
her CV on CV@CV, CareerBuilder
produces the profile for the candidate
based upon the CV – in short the
candidate’s profile is completed in
two clicks. They have removed a
major impediment from the process
with the introduction of this simple
yet effective solution. They are also
the first in the industry to introduce a
profile meter which is an indicator of
the level of completion of the profile.
With this tool, the candidate is always
aware of the status of his profile.
After the initial submission of
the application for a job position, the
candidate is largely unaware of the
status of his application – whether
it has been processed or has it been
rejected or approved? Hire Insider is
the tool that plays the game for the Job
seeker. This tool rightfully empowers
an applicant with the insights into
the job that he/she has applied for.
The product also alerts the applicant
if their resume needs to be updated
to better fare with the competition at
hand. These insights and awareness of
application related analytics can prove
to be extremely crucial for a candidate
With
CareerBuilder,
the employers
not only have a
customized search
engine at their
disposal but also
two equally game
changing tools for
talent acquisition
“
“
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“As an Entrepreneur, I know what
it takes to reach such a stage; it is a
lot of work, blood, sweat and tears.
Individuals will not understand the
difficulties faced in 1995, to start
a company in Embedded Products
and Semiconductors. This is not
(IT) software development, contract
software or body shopping. The
basic understanding of products and
customer requirements takes a lot of
effort. Operating from Ahmedabad
and creating products for clients in
Japan, US and Europe takes special
talent. India requires more Individuals
like Pratul (Pratul Shroff, CEO of
eInfochips) to bring special design
talent to the country. India needs to
learn from him as an example,” said
Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime
Minister of India on public information
infrastructure & Innovations and
Chairman of National Innovation
Council.
Most entrepreneurs dream of
movingtotheU.Sandstartingtheirown
venture in the comforts of the country’s
advanced technological environments.
But Pratul Shroff, Founder and CEO
of eInfochips, challenged the odds
and moved to India after working in
the U.S. for 12 years. Starting off with
just one engineer in his hometown
Ahmedabad, eInfochips has come a
long way since 1994 to now provide
product engineering services and
semiconductor design services to seven
’Fortune -75’ companies and over 30
billion-dollar enterprises spanning
Aerospace, Surveillance, Retail &
eCommerce, Biometric Security,
Semiconductor, Medical devices,
Consumer devices, Communications
& Software Technology.
Moving to India for the love of the
homeland
The organization was started when
Shroff realized a growing need for
development of EDA tools in the
industry. Over time, Shroff assembled
a team of 30 engineers in Ahmedabad
andtrainedthemextensivelyinVerilog,
a hardware description language
(HDL) used to model electronic
systems. This was particularly hard
considering the availability of quality
technology talent in Ahmedabad in the
90s. Pretty soon, eInfochips engineers
were much sought after in the Silicon
Valley for their programming skills
and unique innovative practices.
Recognizing the immense potential on
offer, Shroff continued to provide chip
design and product design services and
expanded the company strategically.
Today, eInfochips has a 1000-strong
workforce across eight design centers
in India, operating sales offices in
seven countries with 90+ customers.
eInfochips has garnered a special
reputation in the industry circles for
bringing innovation into each stage of
the product development cycle.
All throughout eInfochips journey,
Shroff has ensured that the primary
focus is on generating value beyond
cost reduction to customers. “Simple
philosophy is to build people and
people will build the company in
turn.” says Shroff. As the saying
goes, simple strategies are often
the best ones; eInfochips is simply
a birth child of this omnipotent
philosophical approach. “Today
I can confidently say that we can
achieve 50 percent growth year on
year,” adds a proud Shroff.
From Innovation to Industry
Prominence
The growth can be attributed to the
company’s policy of ‘Customer
First’. While generating value
far beyond labor cost arbitrage,
eInfochips has invested into
internal R&D to build a strong
portfolio of 50+ in-house IPs that
customers can leverage for lower
effort, greater predictability and
faster time-to market capabilities.
After 15 years of designing and
engaging customers across two
downturns, eInfochips is going
strong today.
With product innovation
as the bedrock of eInfochips
engagements, it is no surprise
that clients see immense value
in associating with eInfochips.
Working on the latest technologies
also brings in enormous value for
the employees. Having exposure to
the technologies and innovations
that would shape the future is
extremely satisfying for eInfochips
employees. As a result, the
company is able to attract diverse
and skilled talent from across India.
A majority of eInfochips
business comes from critical
industries like Aerospace,
Semiconductors and Medical
Devices. 80 percent business from
existing clients implies a cynosure
on quality of products and client
value delivered. The fact that
these highly critical and complex
products are developed with over
95 percent offshore presence is
a testimony of the innovation,
process and engineering skills
borne by the eInfochips team. They
create value with offshore product
design and development, rather
than augmenting onsite client
teams (body-shopping) with value
limited to cost arbitrage.
Apart from the aforesaid
expertise, another major
characteristic of the solutions
provided by eInfochips is to take
complete ownership of products
from the concept to volume
production. This is made possible
due to the strong ecosystem of
manufacturing partners based
in India, China, US and Taiwan.
While the customers of other
companies spend a lot of time,
money and effort in R&D,
production, procurement, yield and
logistics, eInfochips has ensured a
single point ownership archetype.
It also reduces pressure on the
working capital for clients while
ensuring complete design and IP
confidentiality, a very appreciable
trend moving away from typical
working scenarios seen with other
ODM’s.
With ‘Customer First’,
‘Embracing Impossible
Challenges’ and ‘Disciplined
Execution’imbibed into the culture
and work-ethic of the company, it
is no surprise that eInfochips has a
habit with winning accolades. They
were awarded the No.1 chip design
service provider worldwide by
Gartner, one of the top-20 Global
Design Partners for TI and GESIA
2011 for the best Software Product
Company, to name a few. Moving
forward, after 15 years of struggle
and successes, Shroff and his team
look set to take giant strides and
might just be the next big thing to
emerge out of India.
eInfochips in percentages:
While other design firms employ
a product sustenance model
for revenue, eInfochips are an
innovation driven company - a
relatively challenging task as it
involves nascent technologies and
ever-changing skill requirements.
Over 95 percent of employees in
India is a stark contrast to other
companies that have about 30
percent of their workforce at client
locations across the world. “We
participate in architecture, user
interface and user experience
of the product and from there
we do the complete hardware
implementation, software
implementation, enclosure
designs and put the product out
in the client’s hands. There is no
other company that will do this
as a regular routine operation in
India.” says Shroff.
eInfochips has set aggressive
targets for itself, as it plans
to employ 700 people in this
financial year and grow to a
company of `600 Crores by 2016.
Being a pure-play product and
semiconductor design company,
eInfochips quality standards are
tuned to requirements of products.
Achieving an average revenue
growth rate of 35 percent with
80 percent business from existing
clients summarizes the quality,
innovation and value eInfochips
brings to its clients.
eInfochips:
Setting the Benchmark
inInnovationBy Vignesh.A
Pratul Shroff, Founder & CEO
Company of the Month
siliconindia
| |July 2013
21
12. siliconindia
| |July 2013
23siliconindia
| |July 2013
22
C
hallenges are versatile when it comes to desktop accounting.
Data synchronization, portability, simplicity, frequent upgrades
and integration of the applications are a few of them. Several
companies strive to get the perfect score in their accounting and
payroll management, but to vain. Take for instance a mobile app
development company and provider of software development to U.S. based
clients, Deem Infotech, who was struggling to generate professional invoices
and manage payroll process. Checking for the accounting products available
in the market, they found them not to be of double entry accounting systems.
ProfitBooks, a cloud-based accounting and payroll management application,
was a perfect fit for them as it helped them manage not only invoicing but also
other finances of the office.
Alike Deemed Infotech, ProfitBooks served several other clients who
were chasing for a better, more reliable and portable accounting solutions.
ProfitBooks is the flagship product of The Nextwave Technologies, a Pune-
based company incepted in 2010 by three friends Harshal Katre, Mohnish
Katre and Naveen. Initially, The Nextwave Technologies used to develop
web based applications for Small, Medium and Large Enterprises (SML). But
while developing an application for one of their FMCG clients, The Nextwave
Technologies realized that the existing chain of softwares available were not
good enough to help their client grow or manage the business effectively due
to multi-location presence. Thus the team came up with the idea and that was
the birth of ProfitBooks.net. Ever since its launch in 2012, ProfitBooks has
taken a steep upward growth trajectory.
“Real time data availability across multiple locations, data security, and
continuously updated software are key concerns of customers in our initial
survey. Existing available applications in market are complicated more than
the requirements of SML enterprises and they are tremendously expensive.
Hence, we decided to come up with a product which will make business
operations simpler yet provides them the features of which increases their
efficiency,” says Harshal Katre, Co-Founder & CEO, ProfitBooks.
“I have always got inspired by Apple’s mantra, ‘Simplicity is complexity
placed in order’. Accounting & Payroll always remains complex affairs but
our inspiration is to make it work even for person having no accounting
background,” adds Harshal.
ProfitBooks provides features like
accounting, inventory management,
payroll management, branch
accounting, document management,
task management and contact
management. Built on the “Ruby on
Rail” platform, the one which Twitter
uses, simplicity, automation and
integration are the USPof ProfitBooks.
It aims to replace multiple applications
used by an organization with
single powerful cloud-based secure
application. A person with naïve
knowledge of accounting can easily
handle the application, sync data,
create an invoice and sent it directly
to the client. Being hosted at central
location, the data in ProfitBooks is
always synchronized reducing errors
in calculations helping to take faster
decisions. The data is stored on highly
guarded data centers with four levels
of security (256 bite encryption) and
regular backups are taken.
Understanding the cruxes of
software maintenances and upgrades,
the Profibooks.net application does
not require any installations thus
reducing dependency on technical
people. Being centrally hosted, the
upgrades are pushed for all users by
ProfitBooks team. The app comes
with several extensions that make it
easy to integrate with other apps like
Dropbox.
Team at ProfitBooks is its most
interesting aspect and an important
part of their rapid growth. Harshal has
over 10 years of experience in software
development and implementation
while working with various MNCs. He
was instrumental in implementation
of financial products in Europe and
North America. Naveen is from early
batch of dot com boom and has over
14 years of rich experience in data
architecture working with MNCs.
Apart from these technocrats the
team also includes Mohnish who is
Chartered Accountant with over 8
yearsofexperienceworkinginthefield
of financial research and corporate
advisory. His practical experience and
understanding on client's needs helped
in initial framework of ProfitBooks.
Further, Amit Mahalle, who is a CA &
a post graduate in Actuarial Science,
brings strong analytical skills matured
for more than 6 yrs of experience. The
in-house CA talent enables efficient
product development and addressing
client's needs.
“It is difficult for Software
Engineers and CA’s to agree on one
point. But we wanted to build the
application which will pamper users.
We wanted to design awesomeness;
this sweet friction allows us to align
towards our aim,” complains Harshal
happily.
Convergence of mindset, the biggest
challenge
In India, internet penetration has
geared up in last few years. With
current Internet penetration of 12
percent, India has close to 15 crore
internet users which are expected to
double in next four years. There will
be a time which is not far where SML's
will be selling their items on Amazon,
Flipkart and even to Facebook users.
This will change the way people
do business. Businesses will need
collaborative applications with real
time data.
Though cloud based applications
are new to Indian businesses, it is well
accepted platform for business in the
west because of jillions of benefits
cloud computing provide. SML
enterprises have started understanding
the cloud application and India is
poised to adopt this change.
Way Ahead
ProfitBooks is working on
enhancement of Auditor’s module
which will help accountant community
to save time and offer better services
to their clients. In addition to this,
multi-currency accounting, dedicated
mobile apps, development of APIs
are few of the features which will be
updated in coming months.
The company has started reaching
PAN-India with the help of its Partner
Channel and it is continuously
growing its network of accountants
and partners across India.
“When accounting will come
online, we cannot look it as just stand
alone desktop application moved to
cloud. Its success lies in naturally
linking it to every other system that
business uses. It’s high time we have
to take Accounting from that typical
desktop application to the Future
where it belongs. That's what we are
doing at ProfitBooks,” concludes
Harshal.
TheFutureof
AccountingisnowHERE
ProfitBooks.net:
Harshal Katre,
Co-Founder & CEO
Startup of the Month
By Anamika Sahu
13. siliconindia
| |July 2013
25siliconindia
| |July 2013
24
Most Promising
5&SolutionProviders
HR Software
The demand of human resources is on a hockey stick growth and the new war of talent is on. However,
it is quite challenging for the global organizations to find the perfect resource partners, attract niche
talent, and improve candidate experience, payroll management and other HR initiatives within the
organization. Understanding the need, these companies are allocating budgets to get the best HR
Software and Solution to overcome these challenges. In past few years, the old sleepy HR system market
has turned towards technology to provide the best support and the solution providers have geared up
to provide the finest armor to win this war of talent.
To salute this innovation, siliconindia has come up with “5 Most Promising HR Software & Solution
Providers” whose software, products and services play a crucial role in helping the companies to
overcome HR challenges. These solutions help organizations to better collaborate with, and expectation
setting between HRs and hiring managers, and recruiting the best talent to drive innovation within the
business. Our effort is to make the best meet the best.
Company Founders Founded Description
Greytip Software
Bangalore, Karnataka
greytip.in
Judicious Engineering
Trichi, Tamil Nadu
jeltd.net
Pearson TalentLens
Bangalore, Karnataka
talentlens.in
Saigun Technologies
Noida, Uttar Pradesh
saigun.com
SJS Technologies
Bangalore, Karnataka
sjstechnologies.in
Girish Rowjee
CEO
Mohamed Ibrahim Enayathullah
Managing Director
Sushil Eapen
Managing Director
Tushar Bhatia
President
B Sandeep Shetty, Director
Pavan Kumar Shetty, Director
A provider of HR & Payroll software solutions. It offers a
wide range of HR solutions (from on-boarding to exit) for
customers big and small across industry verticals.
An engineering product company specializing in
customized HRM software systems for small, medium and
large enterprises.
A provider and distributor of assessment solutions for
recruitment, selection and development of 21st
century
workforce.
A provider of HR Management solutions. Saigun's flagship
product EmpXtrack is a next generation software for
Human Resource and Talent Management.
A provider of biometric triggered HRMS solutions
for small and medium industries and corporate
houses.
1994
2013
1921
2002
2008
14. siliconindia
| |July 2013
27siliconindia
| |July 2013
26
SimplifyingHumanResource
ManagementSolutions
Company:
Judicious Engineering
Office:
Trichy,Tamil Nadu
Founder:
Mohamed Ibrahim Enayathullah,
Managing Director
Founded:
2013
Website:
www.jeltd.net
Description:
Anengineeringproductcompany
specializingincustomizedHRMsoftware
systemsforsmall,mediumandlarge
enterprises.
JudiciousEngineering:
O
rganizations around the world
stillrelyonexcelsheetstokeep
track of their HR information,
be it payroll or employee
attendance records. This primitive way
of managing information is ineffective
and cumbersome for companies. Also
the data which can be an asset for an
organization is usually scattered through
various departments, hence the full
potential of it cannot be utilized. These
organizations require software solutions
that can help them streamline all their
employee information in one convenient
place and also solutions that not only
give information but also the analysis to
leverage the information.
Judicious Engineering a young and
dynamic Human Resource management
software provider, is leveraging this
gap and has entered the domestic Indian
market with gusto. The company which
is already a known name in the UAE has
built a revolutionary Human Resource
Management product that be customized
based on the client’s requirements. Be
it labor oriented organizations or vice
versa, Judicious Engineering provides
its customers with the necessary tools
for efficient HRM. “Our product depends
over the customer, the organization
and their specific needs. We can do the
analysis through our software to monitor
employee work performance, project
wise and department wise as well,” says
Mohamed Ibrahim Enayathullah, MD,
Judicious Engineering.
Their well rounded product takes
care of information right from when
an interview is done and an employee
joins the company. From the interview
master, the information is shifted to the
employee master. The software can take
care of attendance recording and thus
ease the process of payroll.
Targeting Different Geographies
Business environments and requirements
in different countries are never similar.
Judicious Engineering has thus built a
product that can take care of a plethora
of needs of an organization. For instance,
organization in Kuwait or UAE require
to keep a stringent track of an employee’s
visa, passport and work permit analysis.
Judicious Engineering’s software lets
clients maintain all this information
efficiently.
The company also addresses a critical
issue of training for Indian employees.
The advantage clients get with Judicious
Engineering is that employers can upload
training videos for employees to update
themselves with new technologies. Then
they have to go through a questionnaire
to test their competence in the new
technique. This further helps companies
to get skilled workforce and fill position
easily.
This Trichy based company which
has service and technical support teams
available in Coimbatore, Bangalore and
Chennai caters to productions companies
who require a separate HR system.
Irrespective of the size of the company,
HR can be managed by Judicious
Engineering’s software solutions. “We
supply the product and if the company
wants us to train their employees on the
software, we are capable of doing that
as well,” adds Enayathullah. They plan
to ambitiously expand their franchise all
across India in the near future.
Mohamed Ibrahim Enayathullah
15. siliconindia
| |July 2013
29siliconindia
| |July 2013
28
ASmoothBiometricHRMSExperienceEvenIntheMost
ChallengingEnvironments!
SJSTechnologies:
N
ikhara Bharath, a
construction company
with multiple sites
across India, had
a tough task of
monitoring his employees due to
workplaces located remotely. A lack
of access to basic amenities like
power, Internet access and other
infrastructural necessities, only added
to their woes.When Nikhara contacted
SJS Technologies, the biometric
solution provider was able to deploy a
one of a kind GPRS enabled biometric
device system which was powered by
solar panels. After every device was
integrated to work leveraging GPRS,
the web of supervision was complete.
After that Nikhara’s administrators
were able to monitor employees in
real time, irrespective of the condition
of the locations.
SJS Technologies, an ISO
9001:2008 company, founded by
Directors, Sandeep Shetty and Pavan
Shetty, has been providing HRMS
solutions that are leveraged by state
of the art technologies since its
foundation in 2008. The company has
ensured a no compromise solution
to its clients’ needs by investing in
German innovation for low costing,
yet high end products and services.
While most of the products in the
industry today are focused on the
offline model, SJS goes that extra
mile by incorporating solutions that
exploit the internet phenomena to the
hilt. This serves as a big advantage
as it makes it possible for a manager
to monitor his employees just with a
simple GPRS network connection on
his mobile device.
“SJS Technologies’ Biometric
triggered HRMS solution suits not
only for the arduous environment it
also efficiently handles the corporate
requirements in HRMS like Employee
self service, Employee attendance and
movement, Leave management etc.,”
says Sandeep. “Most of the available
software will cover only few of the
general requirements. But in real
time it requires more customization
of application and more dedicated
support to resolve the complexities
and to get the proper output,” adds
Pavan.
The most important word that an
organization looks forward to in an
HRMS provider is customization;
Customization according to the
company’s own rules, regulations
and reports. However not many
HRMS providers have the technology
to support clients who have the
requirement of biometrics in testing
environments without power, Internet
and basic infrastructural facilities.
SJS fills this void perfectly with its
highly effective HRMS solutions.
Moving forward SJS looks set for
a smooth vertical growth by adding
close to 250 channel partners for its
cause of providing best and latest
HRMS technologies at very affordable
costs. With a clientele that includes the
likes of Videocon, Schneider-Electric,
Vasan Hospitals and Indian Ministry
of defense, to name a few, the highly
skilled and dedicated team led by
Sandeep and Pavan look set to throw
a few surprises to the big players in
the market.
Company:
SJSTechnologies
Office:
Bangalore, Karnataka
Website:
www.sjstechnologies.in
Founders:
B Sandeep Shetty, Director
Pavan Kumar Shetty, Director
Founded:
2008
Description:
AproviderofbiometrictriggeredHRMS
solutionsforsmallandmediumindustries
andcorporatehouses.
CombiningInnovationand
TimeTestedTechniques
Company:
PearsonTalentLens
Office:
Bangalore, Karnataka
Founder:
Sushil Eapen,
Managing Director
Founded:
1921
Website:
www.talentlens.in
Description:
Aprovideranddistributorof assessment
solutionsforrecruitment,selectionand
developmentof
21st
centuryworkforce.
PearsonTalentLens:
E
nterprises today hire
professionals with varied
levels of aptitude and
experience. Pearson
TalentLens, an arm of
Pearson group estd. 1921, uses time
tested assessment techniques combined
with innovative assessments to help top
companies of the world to select and
develop talent.
The trend setter that sets them apart is
efficacy – the guarantee that their methods
have the capacity to produce an effect.
“TalentLens uses world class products
that are being used all over the world and
develops local norms to meet the needs
of the Indian corporate population,” says
Sushil Eapen, MD, Pearson TalentLens.
Their workforce is populated with some of
the most experienced professionals in the
industry. These experts work closely with
the customers to solve some of the most
complex departmental, psychometric or
test development problems that arise in
the day to day operations of organizations.
For a company to function seamlessly,
it is important to have good intra and
inter team communication. Pearson
TalentLens’s flagship tool that is deployed
globally– the Versant Tests - and also
customized for the Indian population –
VETI or Versant English Test for India –
allows organizations to uphold language
standards that are critical to customer
satisfaction and employee productivity
by improving their communication skills.
Apart from this, there are numerous
other and equally effective tools that
Pearson TalentLens employs to detect
and pin-point the qualities that clients are
looking for in a candidate. Among these
are Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking
Appraisal (W-GCTA) for assessment of
strategic thinking and decision making
abilities, Raven’s Progressive Matrices
for problem solving, and RANRA for
financial literacy. These tools are well
received because of their adaptability
and the agility with which they can be
administered. The tests can quickly and
objectively screen candidates, resulting
in marked improvement in staffing and
talent management processes. Pearson’s
TalentLens recently introduced the
award winning online business English
communication learning tool called
GlobalEnglish in India to address the
challenges faced by employers to improve
the English communication skills of
employees at various levels.
They recently partnered with Future
Group to provide talent assessment
and development solutions to the retail
industry in India. They also work with
numerous consulting companies and in
close contact with the IT sector. Their
RED critical thinking model, which is
specialized for managers, lays out a path
for everyone from individual contributors
to mid-career managers to understand
how critical thinking works and helps
develop these essential skills. This in
turn hones the individual’s ability to
solve difficult on-the-job problems. The
W-GCTA utilizes the powerful RED
model. This is one of the few assessments
available in the market that helps HR
professionals make objective decisions
among managerial candidates.
Pearson TalentLens offers
comprehensive solutions for the HR
fraternity across all verticals. The key
to their triumphs is adaptability and
versatility that they display in using
their tools, combined with their guiding
philosophy – ‘Always learning’. These
qualities pooled with the motivation
to serve its customers with the highest
quality make TalentLens a leader in its
domain.
Sushil Eapen
16. siliconindia
| |July 2013
31siliconindia
| |July 2013
30
Most Promising
5DATA STORAGE
The big data will grow to $24 billion market by 2016 says the research firm IDC. Mobile and smartphones
are among the highest contributor in creating such huge data. The tremendous growth in data generation
globally creates a paramount need to store them in a safe and secure environment. This has created a
huge opportunity for the storage industry, both for flash and cloud storage. Organizations and individuals
are looking for the right storage service providers that can provide operations designed for scale with
margin-optimizing efficiency requiring considerably more storage with considerably less complexity.
With such huge numbers playing on the ground, the prospect for the storage industry seems to be high
and with constant innovation in technology they are adhering with the best solution to the biggest
storage problem. This issue siliconindia has identified “5 Most Promising Data Storage Companies” that
are playing on the nerves of data storage requirements with the cutting edge technology to provide the
best suited solutions to each storage dilemma.
Company Founders Founded Description
Barracuda Networks Inc.
Bangalore, Karnataka
barracuda.com
CtrlS Datacenters
Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
ctrls.in
Netmagic Solutions
Mumbai, Maharashtra
netmagicsolutions.com
SanDisk Corporation
Gurgaon, Haryana
sandisk.in
Sify Technologies Ltd.
Chennai, Tamil Nadu
sify.com
Niall King
Asia Pacific Regional
Vice President
Sridhar Pinnapureddy
CEO
Sharad Sanghi
Managing Director & CEO
Sanjay Mehrotra
Co-Founder, President & CEO
Kamal Nath
CEO
A product portfolio which includes offerings for protection
of email, Web and IM threats as well as products that
improve application delivery and network access, message
archiving, backup and data protection.
A provider of custom-built IT Infrastructure and Services
suitable for large corporations, Co-location Services,
Managed Services, and Disaster Recovery & Business
Continuity Planning Services.
A Datacenter Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (DILM)
Service provider that delivers services to plan, design,
manage, support and migrate IT infrastructure running
mission-critical applications for over 1200 enterprises
across the globe.
A provider of flash memory storage solutions, from
research and development, product design and
manufacturing to branding and distribution of OEM and
retail channels.
A provider of host of products and services for
enterprise thus establishing a premier enterprise
cloud services.
2002
2007
1998
1988
1995
EmpoweringEnterprises tobe
theKingoftheirDataStorage
Company:
Barracuda Networks Inc.
Office:
Bangalore, Karnataka
Founder:
Niall King
Asia Pacific RegionalVice President
Founded:
2002
Website:
www.barracuda.com
Description:
A product portfolio which includes
offerings for protection of email,Web
and IM threats as well as products
that improve application delivery and
network access, message archiving,
backup and data protection.
BarracudaNetworks:
S
outh Carolina Department of
Corrections (SCDC) found
themselves in need of an email
archiving solution to be used
as an effective tool for staff requesting
preparation of legal discovery- a means of
searching for and retrieving emails or files
for use of evidence. Their main priorities
were to minimize costs of manual labor
in the legal discovery sector and increase
proficiency. They compared several
options due to strict budget constraints
and found themselves to be in the middle
of nowhere. The process of researching
other message archiving solutions left the
company frustrated and confused. SCDC
met Barracuda Networks, a Computer
and Networking Security Company who
had successfully resolved several such
cases for over 150,000 customers. And
since then, they are happily residing in
the arms of Barracuda Networks.
Foundedin2002,BarracudaNetworks
combines premises-based gateways
and software, virtual appliances, cloud
services, and sophisticated remote
support to deliver comprehensive content
security, data protection and application
delivery solutions. Their extensive
product portfolio includes offerings for
protection of email, Web and IM threats as
well as products that improve application
delivery and network access, message
archiving, backup and data protection.
“Barracuda Networks prides itself in
brining a technology that is easy to use
to customers and we have brought many
solutions to the world to help solve the
problem of protecting your website or
backing up your data or email,” says
Niall King, Asia Pacific Regional Vice
President, Barracuda Networks.
The company understands that in the
worldofdatageneration;storage,retrieval
and security have been topping the chart
of concern for each individual. But with
their flagship products – Barracuda
Backup and Barracuda Message Archiver
- the company has been successfully
delivering their philosophy of ‘Nobody
does it better’ and gained over 150,000
customers including Coca-Cola, FedEx,
Harvard University, IBM, and several
others. Barracuda never forgets to thank
their partners in playing an eminent part
in the history they have created till now.
Where with other data storage devices,
the users have to juggle with the IT guys
to retrieve his data, Barracuda Networks’
solution provides extreme ability to
the end user to backup and retrieve the
data themselves. The company’s data
stored are always encrypted in 256 bits
encryption which is the highest form of
encryption one can have. The only way to
read the data stored is to club it into the
archive it came from or the administrator
who has access to the box. Barracuda
Network provides anytime-anywhere
availability of data on a real-time basis
by reducing the stress the IT guy may
have brought having to retrieve data for
end users using current solutions, as the
company lets the end user be the ‘King’
of their own data.
Currently, India is a key market
for Barracuda Networks and they are
planning to gain more customers and
more loyal partners strategically to grow
the company’s footprint in the country.
The country holds huge opportunity and
products are priced at the right price-
point and Barracuda Networks is gearing
up to tap these opportunities.
Niall King
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Uncompromising
Pursuitof Excellence
Company:
SanDisk Corporation
Office:
Gurgaon, Haryana
Founder:
Sanjay Mehrotra,
Co-Founder, President & CEO
Founded:
1988
Website:
www.sandisk.in
Description:
Aproviderofflashmemorystorage
solutions,fromresearchanddevelopment,
productdesignandmanufacturingto
brandinganddistributionofOEMandretail
channels.
SanDisk:
S
anDisk, a Fortune 500 and S&P
500 company is a global leader in
flash memory storage solutions.
Publically trading on NASDAQ with
ticker symbol SNDK, the company has
a market cap of $14.98 billion and ranks
among the top players within the space.
SanDisk products enable users
to capture, share, preserve and enjoy
an exciting world of digital content.
Whether it's the removable memory
card in camera, the smartphone in a
user’s pocket or datacentres that power
the cloud, SanDisk is enriching people's
lives through digital storage anytime,
anywhere.
This is a commitment SanDisk has
upheld for 25 years as the company
has grown from a three-person Silicon
Valley start-up to a global leader with
approximately 4,500 employees. Today,
the SanDisk brand is recognized around
theworldanditsflashmemorytechnology
has been deployed pervasively: top
electronics companies embed SanDisk
memory solutions into their devices, and
approximately 250,000 retail outlets offer
SanDisk products to consumers globally.
The company provides flash memory
storage and ships two million units
daily. SanDisk is vertically integrated
global flash memory that allows to the
company to design and develop cutting-
edge storage solutions, manufacture in
a cost-effective and high-volume and
quickly deliver them to thousands of
retail and OEM customers across the
globe. Determined to stay at the top of
the game, Rajesh Gupta, India Country
Manager, SanDisk Corporation, has
several plans to fulfill this commitment.
He says, “The amount of innovation
and R&D that we do reflects in our
products that offer compelling benefits
and help consumers enjoy a smart digital
lifestyle. We continue to do this as we are
dedicated to provide the best service to
our customers”.
SanDisk’s diverse product portfolio
includes flash memory cards, embedded
solutions used in smartphones, tablets,
digital cameras, camcorders, digital
media players and other consumer
electronic devices as well as USB flash
drivers and solid-state drivers (SSD) for
the computing market. For all its product
lines – imaging, microSD and computing,
the company makes a wide offering for
the consumers. While on one hand there
is a wide range of capacities to choose
from depending upon your storage needs,
each product line has a base category
product and a range of high performance
products, the Ultra and Extreme range.
The company also works with key OEM
supply chain stakeholders to enable them
to optimally integrate flash memory in to
their product lines.
The constant innovation in the product
line has created a need to educate the
channels and the consumers frequently.
SanDisk has embarked a channel training
program. A training manager goes to
multiple cities to educate these channels
about SanDisk’s different products
and technologies. To ease the learning
process, SanDisk eliminates tech jargons
and instead use the terminology that
makes sense to a consumer. SanDisk over
past 25 years has been driving the future
of flash memory solutions, and today the
company continues the uncompromising
pursuit of excellence that has made it
the go-to flash memory resource for
companies and consumers alike.
Sanjay Mehrotra
The Usual Suspects are
not the RealTrendsWalter Curd, VP & CIO, Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.
Based in Sunnyvale, Maxim Integrated Products (NASDAQ:MXIM) designs, manufactures, and sells high-performance
semiconductor products. The company was founded in 1983 and has a market cap of $9.23 billion.
T
here are the usual suspects
such as cloud, mobile,
social and big data, but
those are not the real
trends that are impacting
IT in our organization. They are
tactical enablers. The trends that drive
us from a strategic viewpoint are:
The business gets IT now
Companyleadersandemployeesknow
that transformational change requires
a new Business/IT relationship and, as
a result, we have completely realigned
our IT organization to support them.
The business demands ease of use
The bar has been raised, and the
traditional IT focus on functionality
and ease of integration is not well
received. As a result, we have to spend
more time on design and end up with
more applications because the primary
ERP vendors have not spent any time
on user interface of their existing
systems.
The“fragmentation”of IT
The cloud has enabled a proliferation
of point solutions with better user
interfaces. The business is moving
to those applications. As a result, IT
has to get much better at integration.
On the device side, the old mode of
a standard computing platform for
all employees is long gone. IT has to
support the device proliferation.
Turn an IT organization into a True
Strategic Business Partner
IT knows that security tools are very
expensive and not effective. We can
“check the box” for security tools
and processes; however, they are
not effective against state-sponsored
hacking or hacking for profit which is
a huge gap.
How to turn the IT organization
from a tactical execution engine into a
true strategic business partner for the
executive team is also a major issue.
The world is changing around us, and
now, almost every initiative for every
functional executive has a large IT
component. We need to change our
support model to integrate completely
with the business.
Constantly Review Technology and
Trends
We use the push model for innovation.
I encourage my teams, and they
encourage their teams, to constantly
review technology and trends to see
what we can pilot and/or apply in
our organization. Of course, it does
not hurt that we are located in the
middle of Silicon Valley. We are tied
into some VC firms and review the
portfolio of their companies to assist
in guiding their products for our
market. Based on our reviews and
pilots, we determine what fits and
move forward with implementations
after demonstrating the value.
Walter Curd
CIO Insights
Cloud, mobile,
social and
big data are
just tactical
enablers
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T
he pharmaceutical industry
has been hand-in-hand with
technology ever since the
invention of the first drug.
Back then technology was in its most
primitive form of a batter and a bowl,
but like all things that too has changed.
Today, technology plays such a crucial
role in this industry that without it the
entire practice would fall.
Permeating toVariousVerticals
All businesses across verticals invest
in technology to create efficiency and
automate processes. Some solutions
are common across industries like
Financial Accounting, Human
Resources, Manufacturing & Supply
Chain, and Regulatory Compliance to
name a few. Beyond that there are
industry specific solutions which
give the company an advantage
over competitors in many cases. The
Pharmaceutical industry has many
such solutions that impact the business
and some that are required for quality
management as well as compliance
to various regulations governing the
industry. The choice for companies is
to deploy the basic and necessary or
to take advantage of new technology
trends and create a differentiation.
Technology trends do not shape
an industry, their innovative use for
business does. Current hype includes
Big Data, realty and mobility is
growing fast, while cloud still remains
on the fringes. Wearable computing
brings new opportunities for different
industries including healthcare.
The Journey ofTransformation
In Pharmaceuticals, one of the key
challenges unique to India is the
availability of secondary sales
data. There are some companies
who offer market data; the quality,
depth and granularity of information
needs significant improvement.
As more and more distributors and
chemist/pharmacies adopt technology
solutions, there should be some
change. Cipla has undertaken a
transformation journey to upgrade
its technology architecture to address
the future aspirations of business
growth and expansion. This involves
consolidation of data centers, which
hasalreadybeenexecuted,andrenewal
and refresh of some key systems
that will give the company new
capabilities to leverage the market.
MovingTowards the Future
Cipla is a wellness company that
focuses on providing affordable
medicines to everyone globally. The
company’s initiatives around health
and patient education have helped
millions in managing lifestyle,
chronic and life-threatening diseases.
Technology enables the business
and the ability to manage the data
generated through doctor prescriptions
and the data shared by patients. Cipla
is committed to making contribution in
the lives of people across the globe by
providing access to new and creative
healthcare solutions with the belief in
the power of the human spirit. (As told
to Sandeep Sen)
UsingTechnologyToPolish
thePharmaceuticalIndustryArun Gupta, Chief Information Officer, Cipla Limited
Based in Mumbai, Cipla (BSE: 500087, NSE: CIPLA) is a global pharmaceutical
manufacturing company with a presence in over 180 countries.
Arun Gupta
By 2016, advertisers will
spend $77 billion on in-
teractive marketing — as
much as they do on televi-
sion today. Search market-
ing, display advertising,
mobile marketing, email
marketing, and social me-
dia will grow to 26 percent
of all advertising spend as
they are embedded in the
marketing mix.
Courtesy: Forrester
KokilabenHospital:
MakingPatientsLifeEasier
Rajesh Batra, CIO, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital & Medical Research Institute
Rajesh Batra has logged over 22 years in Information Technology in various capacities of which over five years
is in the Healthcare sector. He has been involved in strategizing IT for Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital and
the implementation thereof from the scratch making it more hunky dory.
The evolution-Then and Now
There was a time when hospitals didn’t
invest in IT, but today they don’t see
it as a challenge rather a part of their
strategy to grow. Things have evolved
with a jet speed in the past few years.
Few years back the industry lacked
one such technology that was able to
run a hospital from start to end. Back
office needed a separate system. But
technology has come a long way since
and has become more intelligent.
With HIS (Hospital Information Sys-
tem) which is the life blood
of technology
at Kokila-
ben Hos-
pital, I just need couple of systems to
run it. Through HIS, all the informa-
tion about patients is interfaced in a
single point of information, starting
from the time when the patient walks
in the hospital to the time he goes out
and also generates the bill.
Innovation is quite an infant
Hospitals are yet to realize technol-
ogy as an integral part of their system.
However, a handful of them already
have enhanced their IT to provide
maximum transparency along with
convenience to the patients.
We need a much robust one that
could reduce the headaches of the
patients. As the CIO of the hospital,
I am inclined to make the patient’s
life easier. Gone are the days when
hospitals were scared of IT, today IT
has armored us in expanding our ser-
vice offerings to our patients. The
touch points for the patients have
decreased. But yet technology is
in its infant, the providers have
to come up with solutions and
products that are more robust
and industry specific and able
to reduce the reporting time
from hours to minutes.
Challenges yet to overcome
Hospitals are a complex eco system
and foreign healthcare solutions pro-
viders lack the insights on Indian
healthcare industry and its need mak-
ing it a struggle for CIOs to deal with
vendors. No single vendor can provide
with a single solution for a hospital.
They need to come out with cost con-
scious solutions so that we don’t pass
them to our patients.
Security concern
Ever since the hospitals were in the
paper and pen documentation, secu-
rity and privacy had always been a
concern for patients. The security of
the report could be breached by the
number of persons through whom it
travelled to the patients. But with HIS
and other technical solutions, we are
able to guarantee security to our pa-
tients. The confidentiality of the data
is now much better than what it used
to be earlier.
It is important to understand that hos-
pitals need to spend a lot on technol-
ogy but also has to stretch the dollar
to the last dot to avoid overburdening
patients. (As told to Anamika Sahu)
Rajesh Batra
CIO Insights CIO Insights
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E-Commerce:
Power for the Next Generation
By Raj Subramaniam, Executive Vice President - Global Strategy, Marketing & Communications, FedEx Services
FedEx Corporation (NYSE: FDX) provides transportation, e-Commerce, and business services globally. Headquartered
in Memphis, Tennessee, the company has a current market cap of $30.33 billion.
match the size of today’s U.S., U.K.,
Japan, German, and French markets
combined, reaching up to $650 billion
in sales, according to the McKinsey
Global Institute. That is backed up by
the 193 million Chinese consumers
who shop online, more than any other
country in the world.
This spending potential is
particularly evident among certain
demographics. For example, in
recent years, single men and women
in China have celebrated an annual
“Singles Day,” during which singles
are encouraged to buy gifts for one
another. This past November, Alibaba
reported it sold more than $3 billion
in goods and services on that day, a
staggering amount for a 24-hour time
period.
In India, the e-Commerce industry
has tremendous potential to provide
impetus to the growth of the express
cargo industry. According to a report
by the Internet & Mobile Association
of India (IAMAI) the e-Commerce
market in India was estimated at
Rs.46,520 crore (approx $10Billion)
for 2011. Within that number, the
e-tail market itself was estimated as
Rs.2700 crore ($616 Million) for the
year 2011 and is now growing at the
rate of 30 percent year-on-year.
For consumers in India, online
purchases, excluding travel services,
are evolving with the surge of
e-Commerce websites in the country
today. A recent report says urban
Indian consumers are now confident
enough to make online purchases
of up to Rs.25,000 – quite a jump
from the Rs.2,000-5,000 range in the
recent past and represents significant
opportunity in India for global online
shopping.
Yet there are transportation
challenges when it comes to
e-commerce and SMEs, one of the
biggest being the confusing and
complex array of documents and
paperwork required by hundreds of
countries. Despite the rapid growth of
the industry, customer understanding
of the processes involved in
global e-Commerce transactions is
still limited in India, resulting in
operational challenges from a logistics
perspective.
E-Commerce in India is still in
its nascent stage. With the number of
entrants in this field increasing day-
by-day and the growth rate reaching
its hilt, there is a possibility that in the
coming years, customary retailers will
switch to online business. According
to the latest research by Forrester, a
leading global research and advisory
firm, the e-Commerce market in India
is set to grow the fastest within the
Asia-Pacific Region at a CAGR of
over 57 percent during 2012-16.
While on our first day of business
in the U.S., FedEx delivered 186
packages and today the average
daily volume is more than 9 million
shipments worldwide, including
India. Just as access to the global
marketplace continues to evolve, so
do we. It’s how FedEx plans to be
successful for another 40 years and
beyond.
Raj Subramaniam
T
he largest driving force in
the global economy is now
e-Commerce. By changing
how we buy, and from whom,
the marketplace connects
consumers in the most populous countries
of China and India to an entrepreneur with
an idea, a product, and a laptop.
E-Commerce is getting faster and
smarter, but a truly borderless global
economy relies on both the Internet
and a worldwide delivery network, like
FedEx. Celebrating the company’s 40th
Anniversary in April, it’s interesting to
reflect on the world in 1973 – before
personal computers, digital cameras, or
mobile communication – and realize that all
industrial revolutions involve innovation.
That innovation over the past four
decades is perhaps best illustrated by
China, whose growth in e-Commerce
specifically has been nothing short of
meteoric. The United States definitely took
the lead in the e-Commerce game in the
mid-1990s with the advent of shopping
sites such as Amazon and eBay. Yet China
is now the second-largest e-Commerce
market in the world, with online sales of
$194 billion in 2012—and it is soon to be
the first with expected sales to reach $420
billion by 2015.
The figures are indeed stunning: By
2020 Chinese e-tailing is projected to
View Point
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Challenges occupying CIOs mind
The industry will bring into loads of
challenges for the CIOs to wander
around trying to figure out the
solutions to them. One of them is to
manage the unstructured data, files
and documents, audio and video,
images and various other forms of
data. However, the company needs to
have a scale out approach especially
for those enterprises that do not have
reliable forecast of how data is going
to grow and the kind of data which will
be stored in the storage environment.
The kind of complexity that has
been introduced in data architecture
over a period of time due to ad
hoc implementation of storage in
infrastructure, and managing all
of these complexities has become
increasingly challenging for CIOs.
In today’s environment, the switches
have to move very quickly in rolling
out new products and services once
the opportunity is identified. Such
kind of agility has to reflect in the
IT architecture particularly in data
services and data management.
Tremendous amount of automation
needs to be introduced into the
environment to prevent loss of time
in having manual administration tasks
to create provision and to manage the
data life cycle.
The challenge of mobility
and the desire to provide access
to applications to data on-the-go
through various access devices are
increasingly occupying a CIO’s mind.
As the enterprises increase their global
footprints, there no longer exists the
concept of maintenance window to
the IT architecture. They need to be
up and available all the time across
time zones and across time of the
day. And this can be possible through
non-disruptive operations. So non-
disruptive operation is another big
area where CIOs face challenges.
Security & Safety
Big data storage if neglected can leave
security holes. There are multiple
ways the security can be compromised
with, and one is at the heart of the data
center itself like viruses and malware
that would attack the components in
an IT architecture and infect them.
NetApp has been providing enormous
amount of security credibility that
are embedded on their Clustered
Data ONTAP storage operating
system that allows them to work
with antivirus and scanners from
a variety of vendors to ensure that
the data is flowing into the storage is
free from such malware and identified
viruses.
With the move to cloud
computing, enterprises had
multiple applications
and sets of users who
are accessing the same
physical infrastructure that
they are sharing with other
applications and users.
Even though different
data containers belong to
different units or users,
they reside on the same
shared infrastructure, one
needs to ensure a sufficient
amount of separation
between all of these data
stores.
E n s u r i n g
data integrity
maintenance and
uncompromised security in a world
where increasingly the mobile
devices are the mechanism to which
one access data in an enterprise is yet
another aspect of security.
Future Plans
We will continue the history of
innovating relentlessly our products
for a better offering to our clients. One
of the areas in which we have already
created a product is all flash arrays. In
the next calendar year we will build
more products taking into account
the peculiarities and characteristics
of flash rather than hijacking an
architecture that was used for hard
disk drive and spinning drive. (As told
to Anamika Sahu)
Managing Unstructured Data
Santosh D’Souza, Director-Technology, NetApp India
NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) creates storage and data management solutions that deliver cost efficiency and accelerate
business breakthroughs. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company has a market cap of $13.98 billion.
T
he big data market on a global note will reach
$12.4 billion in 2013, predicts Visiongain - a
big data research firm. Data coming from all
the directions will compel the storage industry
to provide different kinds of storage media with
varied traits of performance and capacity along with less
power consumption even in a unified storage environment.
EmergingTrends
Software defined data centers are one of the emerging trends
within the industry. We create a supplement to other trends
like virtualization, cloud computing and mobility and tries
to deliver a combination of storage virtualization, storage
abstraction and automation of workflow and processes that
involve data to deliver unprecedented amount of agility.
Our recently launched Clustered Data ONTAP has
storage virtual machine technology as its heart, which
allows us to abstract the operating system from the
hardware itself and can be managed by one single instance
of Clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system.
Pain Points
Addressing growth, simplifying storage environment
and storage management, delivering secure access in a
mobile world are some of the pain points that need to be
addressed at the utmost urgent procedure. Low latency and
high bandwidth access to data is another concern for the
industry. Over the last 4-5 years, the emergence of flash
tech is also been interesting. The combination of flash cash
and SSD has increasingly been used to render extremely
high demanding application workloads that require low
latency - high bandwidth access to data.
Santosh D’Souza
StillRemainsaChallenge
View Point
The combination of
flash cash and SSD
has increasingly
been used to
render extremely
high demanding
application workloads
“
“
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company has learnt that the world
is moving into a space where we
connect with different people. One
other megatrend is the notion of
everybody is a photographer and a
filmmaker. Close to hundred hours
of video and 200,000+ images
are shared every minute on the
Internet. All of the countries are
accelerating China is accelerating at
an expeditious pace and has grown
bigger than the U.S. for mobile
trends.
Hackathons- the New Fun Way to
Speed up Innovation
To drive innovation, many
companies are now resorting to the
event type known as hackathons,
or codefest. Hackathons are a great
waytoengagetheemployeesandget
the best out of their programming
abilities. A hackathon is an event
in which computer programmers
and others involved in software
development, including graphic
designers, interface designers
and project managers, collaborate
intensively on software projects.
After consumer insights, the
programmers take a proposition
to build a prototype that can be
the most best suited for the target
audience. While a normal program
building routine takes close to 3 to
4 months, a hackathon can lead to
very fast and successful decisions
within a week. A prototype can be
envisioned on day one and can be
tested on the fifth day.
Consumers want Smartphones to
be an All-In-One Device
In the purview of long term goals,
connected products are increasingly
being developed by Philips. There
are a lot of new devices in the
offering for the future in Philips. The
consumer expects the Smartphone
to play a bigger role in their day
to day activities. To accommodate
these changing trends, organizations
need to get smarter and smarter.
Over time old devices will take up
new roles, even the baby monitor
can even become a sleep coach.
The baby monitor could help by
analyzing the historical data of the
sleep patterns of the baby and then
guide the parents on what would be
the most ideal way to put the baby
to sleep. Using historical data will
become a very important roadmap
for consumer technologies in the
nearby future. (As told to Vignesh.A)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS) will achieve a com-
pound annual growth rate
(CAGR) of 41.3 percent
through 2016, whereas,
Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS) will achieve a 27.7
percent CAGR through
2016, with Cloud Manage-
ment and Security Servic-
es attaining 26.7 percent
in the same forecast pe-
riod.
Courtesy: Gartner
DatawillDrive
theFutureof
ConsumerElectronicsVijay Solanki, Senior Director - Digital Innovation, Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (NYSE-PHG) is a Dutch multinational engineering
and electronics conglomerate headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands with a
market cap of $25.5 billion.
P
hilips is all about innovation, digital innovation.
The foremost priority is to analyze which
product can be digitalized and made simpler.
The strategy employed is to keep a close tab on
consumer trends and market pain points.
The role of Philips is to put brains into products. By placing
brains into products, we bring the product closer to the
consumers’ heart. For instance, in a baby monitor for a
mother of a new born baby, we add a few sensors, cameras
and a microphone. By adding an extra feature of being able
to integrate the same into a Smartphone; it is possible to
create a different experience that can allow other family
members such as grandparents to take care of the child.
The biggest concern around young babies is being alerted
around an issue. So suddenly what was just a baby monitor
starts to become much more than that, the role requires
absolute thinking that allows us to completely transform
the products.
The Move from Hardware to Software
Revolving around the challenges faced, Philips faces
the challenges that big organizations which is digital go
through on a daily basis. These changes are disrupting
the entire industry. Traditionally the business focus of our
organization has been around hardware. Now there is a
strong attraction towards software and services. Equally we
are moving from hardware to software and from products
to services. Philips is gearing up to operate in this new
world. We are looking at changing our business models to
accommodate movement towards software and services.
Inthecontextoftrends,thebasicmobiletrendsaredefinitely
making waves around the world; more specifically, growth
in connectivity. As mobiles grow smarter and smarter, the
View Point
Vijay Solanki
The role of Philips
is to put brains into
products. By placing
brains into products, we
bring the product closer
to the consumers’heart
“
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T
he global cyber security situation has reached a tipping
point, where the volume and frequency of attacks penetrat-
ing an organization’s perimeter is causing IT administra-
tors around the world to question the effectiveness of their
existing security architecture. This is despite the organiza-
tions deploying traditional signature-based defenses such
as firewalls, intrusion prevention, and anti-virus systems to mention a
few. Security technologies considered state-of-the-art three years ago are
quickly becoming inadequate given the changes in the cyber threat land-
scape. The result is the cyber security industry getting redefined in a big
way by new technologies and players.
NewBreedofMulti-StageCyberAttacks
The biggest change in the cyber-attack model over the last couple of years
is indicated by the phenomenal success of the targeted attack. Just in the first
four months of 2013, attacks have compromised the systems and net-
works at large banks, a popular social network site and a few well-
known technology companies, each of which was targeted
and not a victim of a randomwide-spread attack.
Next-generation threats are complex, cutting across
multiple attack vectors to maximize the chances of
breaking through network defenses. Multi-vector at-
tacks are typically delivered via the Web or email.
They leverage application or operating system vul-
nerabilities, exploiting the inability of conventional
network-protection mechanisms to provide a unified
defense. In addition to using multiple vectors, ad-
vanced targeted attacks also utilize multiple stages to
penetrate a network and then extract the valued in-
formation. This makes it far more likely for attacks
to go undetected. The five stages of the advanced
attack lifecycle are as follows:
Stage1:
System exploitation: The attack at-
tempts to set up the first stage, and
exploits the system using “drive-by at-
tacks” in casual browsing. It’s often a
blended attack delivered across
the Web or email threat vectors, with
the email containing malicious URLs.
Stage2:
Malware executable payloads are
downloaded and long-term control
established: A single exploit translates
into dozens of infections on the same
system. With exploitation successful,
more malware executables—key log-
gers, Trojan backdoors, password
crackers, and file grabbers—are then
downloaded. This means that crimi-
nals have now built long-term control
mechanisms into the system.
Stage3:
Malware calls back: As soon as the
malware installs, attackers have
cracked the first step to establishing a
control point from within organization-
al defenses. Once in place, the malware
calls back to criminal servers for fur-
ther instructions. The malware can also
replicate and disguise itself to avoid
scans, turn off anti-virus scanners, rein-
stall missing components after a clean-
ing, or lie dormant for days or weeks.
By using callbacks from within the
trusted network, malware communica-
tions are allowed through the firewall
and will penetrate all the different lay-
ers of the network.
Stage4:
Data exfiltration: Data acquired from
infected servers is exfiltrated via en-
crypted files over a commonly allowed
protocol, such as FTP or HTTP, to an
external compromised server con-
trolled by the criminal.
Stage5:
Malware spreads laterally: The crimi-
nal works to move beyond the single
system and establish long-term con-
trol within the network. The advanced
malware looks for mapped drives on
infected laptops and desktops, and can
then spread laterally and deeper into
network file shares. The malware will
conduct reconnaissance: it will map out
the network infrastructure, determine
key assets, and establish a network
foothold on target servers.
TraditionalVsNextGenSecurityTechnologies
The traditional security technologies
regardless of whether it is a firewall,
anti-virus or intrusion prevention sys-
tem requires prior knowledge about the
attack before they can offer preventive
measures. While most legacy security
companies claim proactive protection,
it is minimal at best. The real effective-
ness in legacy solutions comes from
“known” attacks, for which some type
of a signature is available. They fail to
prevent the vast majority of targeted
zero-day or “unknown” attacks, and in
recent times they have acknowledged
their limitation. Given the sophisti-
cated methods of targeted infiltration, it
is not possible for any security systems
to obtain a signature of the advanced
attacks. Such attacks have customized
approaches to penetrate a target organi-
zation, and by its very nature, samples
are not available to create signatures
before the attack. This fact is proven
out almost weekly in form of the vari-
ous publicized attacks that is catching
even sophisticated IT security profes-
sionals off guard.
This fundamental change in the
threat pattern has redefined the security
landscape and allowed new players to
set a revised benchmark for protecting
enterprises. The next generation of
security technologies does not rely on
signatures, and are able to utilize vir-
tual execution models across multiple
vectors to ascertain malware to a high
degree of accuracy even in the case of a
previously unknown attack. The more
sophisticated next generation security
products provide bi-directional protec-
tion across multiple stages of an attack
by identifying communication and
data infiltration out of the enterprise
network to a malicious command and
control server.
Conclusion
The threat landscape has gone through
a paradigm shift in the last couple of
years. Nuisance attacks have been re-
placed by infiltration for gain. Wide
spread attacks on millions of comput-
ers have given way to targeted attack.
Multi-stage attacks are the new weapon
of choice for high value exfiltration.
The value proposition of defense only
against known attacks clearly falls
short of the need of the hour. In the
not too distant future, signature-based
security technologies will only sup-
plement the more innovative real-time
virtual execution model that provides
protection against known and unknown
threats.
IncreasingTargeted Cyber Attacks
MakingEnterprisesMoveTowards
Signature-LessApproachBy Sridhar Jayanthi, Vice President of Engineering & Managing Director India Operations, FireEye
FireEye is a global network security company that provides automated threat forensics and dynamic malware protection
against advanced cyber threats. Founded in 2004, the company is headquartered in Milpitas, California and has raised
$85.5 million in various rounds of funding from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Juniper
Networks and several other investors.
Sridhar Jayanthi
View Point
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