Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: And turn it all into products?

Frank: Well, not so much turn it into anything in particular. I have a feeling that there is a lot of stuff that is either very old and not in sync with business, or of very limited use, and there is a real opportunity to take out a lot of old capabilities that are underutilized, but this hasn’t been dealt with. For example, when we migrated to [Lotus] Notes, when we did that back in like 2004, 2005, we had 30 some-odd thousand Notes databases. As we went through them, we found out a lot of them are underutilized or not used at all. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: Let me ask you a question on that, although from a slightly different perspective. I recently had a conversation, last week actually with the CIO of Intel, Diane Bryant.

Frank: Yes, I know Diane.

Sramana: She talked about platform as a service at length. Intel is running its own platform as a service solution in-house. Of course, she doesn’t like to do this. This is not something she is happy about. But her reasoning was that she would not like to be locked into one of the PaaS vendors, whether it is Salesforce.com or Google Apps or Microsoft Azure. So, I would like to get your perspective on what do you see as the platform as service evolution? Where is it going, what are the trends, and how do you see this market shaping up? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: This question of broadband is obviously an open question. I think it remains to be seen how that will play out. Where else do you see in the broad space of collaboration – we have touched on it from different perspectives – where do you see opportunities for entrepreneurship? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: I think part of it is that, the idea that people have to be dressed for a call is a bit of a barrier to entry, but there is also something else. When you look at these video conferencing systems, they are not trivial. They are widely available now, but they are not entirely trivial. If you have many parties on different types of configurations, the video conferencing system often hiccups. And this may not be true for you because you have a highly controlled corporate environment, but if you look outside the corporate environment or the enterprise environment, it is not quite as seamless. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: What about the higher-end cutting edge collaboration functionalities? Let me go to the absolute other extreme, desktop tele-presence. How far are we from desktop tele-presence in the cloud?

Frank: I don’t think we are that far, because a lot of the pieces are falling into place. Right now, I am talking to you from my laptop at a third-party training facility that owns a Wi-Fi connection. If you are on the same technology we use, we could be doing this call in a video session on the desktop. We have about 25,000 video enabled m-points as webcams. So, we are already doing desktop video across the company. We have tele-presence at the high end. I think you are going to start seeing the cost point on the cameras dropping. When that happens, I think you are going to see a lot of the webcams move to high definition, and that experience will be similar to the quality of the experience you get with tele-presence. >>>

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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