With its CLM model that can be used for private, public
and hybrid cloud environments, Suhas Kelkar, CTO, BMC Software, APAC talks
about the company’s partnership with Vodafone and the national UID project, and
how cloud will be crucial for 3G and 4G networks going forward.
What is the latest that BMC is doing on the
cloud platform in India?
At BMC Software, we are providing customers with a
unified management platform that helps in managing these different initiatives.
In this regard we have introduced specific components in our Cloud Lifecycle
Management (CLM) offering that address cloud use cases such as elasticity,
resource management, policy based deployments, chargeback/showback, self
service and service based catalogues. CLM is designed to enable enterprises,
public agencies, and service providers to achieve the agility required for
building and managing highly flexible cloud services, across public, private
and hybrid cloud environments. BMC’s second-generation CLM solution provides
multi-tiered cloud services support for deploying business-ready cloud
environments from request to retirement, thereby accelerating provisioning,
optimizing ongoing operations, and rapidly meeting the needs of the business.
Please elaborate on your partnership with
Vodafone India?
When we started our engagement with Vodafone India we
identified many areas where operational efficiencies and automation will result
in improvement in quality of service and reduce service outage. One critical
area was their distributed service delivery platform across the different
operating circles. This meant multiple processes for supporting the users and
manual intervention to coordinate and resolve issues faster. This also meant
there were few instances of identifying repeated failures and provide a
permanent fix to the problem. They also needed a mechanism to measure the SLAs
and find a mechanism to create service improvement plans. To achieve this, we
proposed a unified service delivery platform from BMC that helped to implement
a unified ITIL based platform across the organization. This helped in reducing
the resolution time and repetitive failures. This also gave the management team
inputs on areas of improvement and paved the way to create service improvement
plans and the right amount of automation to support these initiatives.
Since you offer cloud solutions for
government, are you doing anything in this department for the Indian
government?
There are multiple initiatives that are underway and in
various stages with different government departments. Since the approach of
adoption of cloud is different for each agency/department we are building
specific solutions to address their needs. Technological advancements are
essential for effective governance. For example, the UID project is one
such massive initiative by the government that will be linked to cloud in a
major way.
What is the scope of cloud in the telecom industry
going forward? Will it bring about many changes?
Cloud computing has been creating opportunities for
mobile network operators. Cloud spells a huge boon for Next Gen Networks. The
3G and 4G services will benefit from mobile cloud services in a big way as they
will be able to deploy new services, create a platform for new applications
development and manage services and bring down costs. Not to mention the
enhanced speeds that users will experience. Cloud is, therefore, a very natural
adoption phase for telecom companies, who can combine their networks with
innovative technologies by leveraging cloud.
Cloud computing has several benefits that the telcos find
appealing. The major benefits are optimization through lower costs, more
elasticity and greater speed. Clouds can greatly increase network traffic and
utilization and thus transport revenues. Also, telecom operators can provide
secure quality-of-service (QoS) connectivity to and from the data centers
and their customer-connectivity offerings can become very flexible
(elastic) in terms of bandwidth. Cloud will also boost network traffic across
the globe. Having said that, telcos are also raising questions about data
security, which need to be addressed by cloud vendors across sectors.
How do you ensure security of your cloud
offerings?
Security has been a big concern in cloud computing. We
have architected security from ground up in our Cloud Lifecycle Management
(CLM) solution. We are partners with some of the largest network equipment
companies and together we have come up with a solution that gives customers
flexibility to tailor cloud security. Security also needs to be tightly coupled
with compliance as this is a continuous process. BMC solutions are built to
address this through policies and have a continuous governance model to ensure
that compliance is maintained and violations are auto detected.
What is your business plan in India for the
next 1-2 years?
We have a very ambitious plan to tap the India market, as
India is a key operation hub for the company and supports most of the R&D
work. We have come a long way in the last ten years with significant expansions
in our India operations out of Pune. We are steadily gaining momentum in this
market. We are closely working with all major SIs (system integrators) to drive
cloud enablement in India and for this, India R&D is a vital part of our
global growth story. We are part of all major Cloud deals and have also better
aligned our sales organization in India to ensure success. 22 percent of the
entire BMC employee population and about 50 percent of R&D strength is
located in India. Most importantly, development of our Cloud offering is led
from India, and actually has also been pioneered in India. We plan to grow our
head count in India (1300 employees) by 15-17 percent per year for the next
three years.
By Beryl M