Alpana Doshi, CIO, RCOM

Heading the technology backbone of a large telecom company is not an easy task. But Alpana Doshi, CIO, Reliance Communications does it with ease by leveraging on her more than 2 decades of rich cross-functional experience cutting across offshoring, communications, media and entertainment, and SI, etc, among others. She is more of a CXO owing to the multi-faceted roles she has played over the years - all relating to strategic transformations leading to aligning IT with the core business. Clearly, she is the brand ambassador for innovation in cracking new business models and making her an industry leader in business and technologies transformation in large organizations for tangible results. Recently in an exclusive interview to Dataquest, Alpana Doshi talked about big data, its relevance, and how it's playing an enabling role at Reliance Communications. Excerpts

- Alpana Doshi
CIO, RCOM

With hype over cloud computing ebbing out, there is a new kid on the block - big data. Vendors of all hues are pitching it as the 'next big thing in IT'. As a CIO, how do you view all this action?

Big data helps organizations in maintaining a competitive advantage by focusing on growth areas. As the time grows, there is a significant shift in the telco product usage, from voice to data usage. VAS, 3G, and 4G will spurt data and big data solutions will be required. Companies in India can gain immensely from big data tools with increasing consumption power, disposable income, constantly involving buyer preferences, etc. Somewhere along the way, there will be too much 'digital intrusion' in a consumer's life.

Analysts believe that social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, provide a significant analytical potential to business. Gartner estimates that by 2015, businesses using big data analytics will outperform their peers financially by 20%. Many early birds in big data analytics have chosen open source platforms like Yahoo!, Facebook, etc.

 

India is still an evolving country in terms of traditional storage topologies. Do you think it's a little pre-mature or do you see big data impacting the Indian enterprises in a big way?

Over the last few years, there have been new technologies evolving in the storage segment. One of the major reasons is the spurt in data growth and its retention. Another is the mergers and acquisitions like HP buying 3PAR, IBM taking over XIV, EMC taking over VMware and Greenplum. For instance, progressive enterprises have adopted technologies like the low-cost/high IOPS storages in mid-range category, de-duplication enabled and thin provisioned enabled storages. Almost all storages are now 'thin provisioned enabled'. Moreover instances like GRID based, storage farm, cloud enabled storages - also known as - 'storage as a service', etc, are getting adopted. Interestingly, we have almost tested all the technologies and are working towards the implementation.
On the Impact of Big Data ...

Technologies that have revolutionized IT to what it is today are mainframe revolution, PC revolution, internet revolution, cloud revolution; and now, big data is becoming the next big thing. Big data is a concept of managing huge data marts by evolving technologies of multiple parallel processing, analytics, and near real-time predictive analysis that is - analytics over data warehousing storage. Big data helps organizations in maintaining a competitive advantage by focusing on growth areas. As the time grows, there is a significant shift in the telco product usage. From voice to data usage, VAS, 3G, and 4G will spurt data and big data solutions will be required.

Would you be exploring big data at your enterprise? What are your strategies and the expected benefits?

Certainly yes, and indeed in a big way! The major role will be in making the business enlightened on the power of information that can be carved out of the big data mart. As said earlier, this has to be driven from the corporate and all other relevant stakeholders - business/finance/IT, etc, should work hand in hand to reap the results.

 

Reliance has been actively involved in big data solutions due to sheer size of our databases. We have adopted multi-parallel processing DB to store CDR and unstructured and perform analytics on it. We have implemented storage virtualization. We have also implemented unified storage (SAN, NAS) in a single box. Reliance uses solutions such as business analytics, EAI, ERP, BI, etc, which also help in analytical planning. Business Objects is being used for reporting purpose. We also use multi-parallel processing DB for its excellent analytical capabilities. Continuing further to maximize benefits, we are evaluating/evolving an innovative process to manage the data system by classifying it into online and offline data.

For the CIOs who are looking at big data closely, what are the key factors they should look into before putting in place a big data strategy?

It depends on the acceptance of the real facts - how the company thinks and what are their visions and strategies in handling these complex problems? As far as RCOM is concerned, we are already in the foray in managing the spurt. Reliance has been actively involved in big data solutions due to sheer size of our databases. We have adopted multi-parallel processing DB to store CDR and unstructured data and perform analytics on it. We have implemented storage virtualization. We have also implemented unified storage (SAN, NAS) in a single box.