Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Frank: We don’t generate our own power. A lot of the computing stuff that’s similar across companies, why wouldn’t you be buying that capacity outside the four walls of the company and getting better economies of scale and capability? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

In this interview we spoke with Frank B. Modruson, CIO of Accenture. He leads a high-performance global IT organization that directly supports the business goals of a $21.6 billion company. He oversees all business applications and technology infrastructure, helping to enable more than 223,000 employees in 52 countries worldwide to work anytime, anywhere. Modruson has transformed IT into a strategic asset for Accenture. Under his leadership, the IT organization has produced an ability to run IT as a business, implemented a comprehensive governance model, and streamlined the technology infrastructure, and more. >>>

India’s Big Opportunity In SaaS

It was clear to me way back in the nineties that India’s journey forward as a center of excellence in software would not gain legitimacy without some home grown product companies. Amidst the outsourcing boom, however, it was impossible to gain traction for the idea. Since March 2007, I have often orchestrated discussions on my blog on why India was still lacking in product companies. In June 2007, I interviewed Sridhar Vembu, the now famous founder of Zoho. Soon after, in my Forbes column, I introduced him as the smartest unknown Indian entrepreneur.

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: FreshDesk, Chennai, India

A finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge, Freshdesk is a SaaS company that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand customer support software that offers multi-channel social support. Freshdesk introduces itself as a kind of Salesforce.com for customer support so to speak. Small- and medium-business owners can set up online customer support platforms that combine the backend help desk system used by agents (ticketing, knowledge management) with an online customer portal (self service, forums, idea management, voting, etc.) on the front end. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: Bizosys, Bangalore, India

Bizosys Technologies, a Bangalore, India based software engineering company was founded in 2009. The founders, Sunil Guttula and Abinasha Karana are experienced IT professional with 15 years’ experience between them solving various enterprise IT problems. Guttula, Bizosys’ CEO, and Karana founded the company with the goal to “simplify software development.”

Toward that end, they have created two products. The first is HSearch, a NoSQL technology based search engine for big data that aims to break the barrier of scale of growing information and accessing it across information silos. The second product is 10Screens, a tool to visualize business requirements critical to software development, which tend to be hampered by poor communication among various stakeholders. 10Screens is currently a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: You have not seen any products out there that meet to your specs?

Diane Bryant: Consumerization is such a buzzword. With consumerization, I do believe the consumer solutions because social media is a consumer solution. I believe that the providers of the social media solutions will eventually adopt enterprise hardened attributes. What we all I need is consumer user experiences, but with the enterprise capability. I do see continuous investment by the consumer companies, whether you are talking about handheld or smartphones or tablets or operating systems or social media solutions. I see them continuing to invest in hardening their solutions in their enterprise security elements, because there is that just amazing blur of the world between consumer and corporate. We will continually increase the amount of support we do for consumer devices and divide up the enterprise. It is what employees want, and it is our job to make our employees more productive. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: Now, switching gears a bit. In all this work you have been doing – and you are deep into the process – what are some of the holes you see? I run this program called One Million by One Million, and the goal is to help a million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in annual revenue and beyond. Part of the blog’s effort is to highlight blue-sky opportunities and open problems within the cloud world. From your vantage point, what do you see as open problems that you would like to point entrepreneurs to? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: And security? What is your strategy vis-à-vis security?

Diane Bryant: Again, that is step one on the security factor. What are the applications that are of high risk? We don’t put those into the cloud. Then we go through, and we have to look at compliance as well. We are in the early days of cloud and anything more mature. These aren’t black and white statements, but today compliance, more precisely compliances and auditing, is around physical service. You are looking at the application and the server that it’s running on and who has control over that server. What are the controls of that server? >>>