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Pradeep Kar
Founder, Chairman and MD, Microland
Infrastructure - Arena for disruptive technologies
Pradeep Kar is the founder, chairman and managing director of Microland, India’s leading provider of outsourced IT infrastructure management services.
Under Pradeep’s leadership, Microland has emerged as a leading Indian provider of IT Infrastructure Management Services employing 2500+ people across the world. Microland has been recognized as a key player in the Remote Infrastructure Management Services space by the top three outsourcing industry tracking entities, which include Black Book of Outsourcing, International Association of Outsourcing Professionals and Global Services, where Microland was amongst the Top 10 Best Performing Infrastructure Providers.
A serial entrepreneur, Pradeep founded and sold 3 technology companies notable amongst them was Indya.com, which he sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; Planetasia.com, India’s first Internet Professional Services Company and Net Brahma Technologies.
He sits on the board of UBM plc, a global live media and B2B communications, marketing service and data provider listed on the London Stock Exchange; on the Advisory Board of Leaders’ Quest, an international social enterprise based in London and on the South Asia Initiative Board of Trinity College, Dublin. Pradeep is the immediate Past President of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), Bangalore Chapter and is the Founding Member of the Bangalore Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization. Pradeep also chairs the Infrastructure Management Services Forum of Nasscom, the apex body of the Indian Software & Services industry.
Pradeep has been recognized with numerous accolades; notable among these is the Indian Express “India Young Business Achiever Award” as well as being selected by the World Economic Forum as a 'Global Leader for Tomorrow’. He has been featured in ‘Newsweek International’ as ‘Stars of Asia’ and in ‘Business India’ as ‘Stars of India’.
He holds a postgraduate degree in Management and a Bachelor of Engineering degree. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus award by the National Institute of Technology, Nagpur in 2010. His interests include reading, photography and golf.
Infrastructure - Arena for disruptive technologies
Offshore outsourcing, as a delivery model, started with ADM and BPO. Infrastructure outsourcing is the third wave of outsourcing, which began a few years back, and has become mainstream now. Large enterprises are opting for a multi-vendor strategy where they selectively outsource service areas such as email, networks, data centre, etc.; whereas mid-sized enterprises prefer to outsource the entire infrastructure operations. In both cases, the preference is shifting towards specialist vendors. This is leading to a rise in first time infrastructure outsourcers. Enterprises that have not off-shored their infrastructure operations to India are now moving the same from their local service provider.
From an infrastructure operations perspective, automation, industrialised service delivery, service orchestration and service management are now the key drivers for companies globally. While cost savings continues to be important, enterprises are now seeking agility, better IT-to-business alignment and high performance from their providers. Outcome based pricing and flexible utility like services are gaining importance. Clearly, specialist vendors have better ability to meet these expectations.
While infrastructure operations management has become a mature practice, the enterprise IT landscape is witnessing major disruptions, primarily led by new paradigms such as virtualization, cloud computing, consumerisation and mobility, which are very infrastructure centric. The convergence of these paradigms is creating new challenges for companies and also providing new opportunities for business transformation. They impact not only how IT services are delivered and consumed, but also the way business is conducted. We are seeing a trend where clients are looking at ways to leverage these new paradigms while continuing to address traditional infrastructure challenges. They want specialist vendors to address both these requirements.
The key drivers in the new norm are to achieve business growth, agility, efficiencies, and value additions rather than just cost savings. Enterprises are seeking vendors who would help them move beyond cost optimisation. They would expect vendors to help them in transitioning to the newer technologies and solutions. The complexity of the new paradigm solutions continues to increase and CIOs need help in their IT-as-a-Service journey. Microland adopts a co-creation model to engage with enterprises, rather than being a conventional solution or service provider; Microland’s co-creation approach focuses on partnering with the customer, to jointly define business challenges, identify transformation opportunities and design and implement solutions that truly create the cloud enabled enterprise of tomorrow. The IT-as-a-Service paradigm is forcing us to innovate in many ways to deliver services, add new service lines to address the disruptive technologies and invest in areas such as automation. Increasingly, clients are expecting value-addition like predictive analytics for proactive fault prevention, as well as to achieve better governance and derive superior business value from IT.
Multi-sourcing:
The infrastructure space is dotted with multiple vendors supporting different towers or a single tower being serviced by multiple vendors. Infrastructure outsourcing was associated with proximity which need not necessarily be the most economical option. By virtue of hands-on trouble shooting nature of their delivery model and their proximity to the client, the local service providers acquired a certain standing in the market. The break-down of these traditional factors combined with reduction in bandwidth costs and clients’ evolving requirement for service management, proactive support & reporting have led to a rise in offshoring and a need for multiple providers.
Under Pradeep’s leadership, Microland has emerged as a leading Indian provider of IT Infrastructure Management Services employing 2500+ people across the world. Microland has been recognized as a key player in the Remote Infrastructure Management Services space by the top three outsourcing industry tracking entities, which include Black Book of Outsourcing, International Association of Outsourcing Professionals and Global Services, where Microland was amongst the Top 10 Best Performing Infrastructure Providers.
A serial entrepreneur, Pradeep founded and sold 3 technology companies notable amongst them was Indya.com, which he sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; Planetasia.com, India’s first Internet Professional Services Company and Net Brahma Technologies.
He sits on the board of UBM plc, a global live media and B2B communications, marketing service and data provider listed on the London Stock Exchange; on the Advisory Board of Leaders’ Quest, an international social enterprise based in London and on the South Asia Initiative Board of Trinity College, Dublin. Pradeep is the immediate Past President of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), Bangalore Chapter and is the Founding Member of the Bangalore Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization. Pradeep also chairs the Infrastructure Management Services Forum of Nasscom, the apex body of the Indian Software & Services industry.
Pradeep has been recognized with numerous accolades; notable among these is the Indian Express “India Young Business Achiever Award” as well as being selected by the World Economic Forum as a 'Global Leader for Tomorrow’. He has been featured in ‘Newsweek International’ as ‘Stars of Asia’ and in ‘Business India’ as ‘Stars of India’.
He holds a postgraduate degree in Management and a Bachelor of Engineering degree. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus award by the National Institute of Technology, Nagpur in 2010. His interests include reading, photography and golf.
Infrastructure - Arena for disruptive technologies
Offshore outsourcing, as a delivery model, started with ADM and BPO. Infrastructure outsourcing is the third wave of outsourcing, which began a few years back, and has become mainstream now. Large enterprises are opting for a multi-vendor strategy where they selectively outsource service areas such as email, networks, data centre, etc.; whereas mid-sized enterprises prefer to outsource the entire infrastructure operations. In both cases, the preference is shifting towards specialist vendors. This is leading to a rise in first time infrastructure outsourcers. Enterprises that have not off-shored their infrastructure operations to India are now moving the same from their local service provider.
From an infrastructure operations perspective, automation, industrialised service delivery, service orchestration and service management are now the key drivers for companies globally. While cost savings continues to be important, enterprises are now seeking agility, better IT-to-business alignment and high performance from their providers. Outcome based pricing and flexible utility like services are gaining importance. Clearly, specialist vendors have better ability to meet these expectations.
While infrastructure operations management has become a mature practice, the enterprise IT landscape is witnessing major disruptions, primarily led by new paradigms such as virtualization, cloud computing, consumerisation and mobility, which are very infrastructure centric. The convergence of these paradigms is creating new challenges for companies and also providing new opportunities for business transformation. They impact not only how IT services are delivered and consumed, but also the way business is conducted. We are seeing a trend where clients are looking at ways to leverage these new paradigms while continuing to address traditional infrastructure challenges. They want specialist vendors to address both these requirements.
The key drivers in the new norm are to achieve business growth, agility, efficiencies, and value additions rather than just cost savings. Enterprises are seeking vendors who would help them move beyond cost optimisation. They would expect vendors to help them in transitioning to the newer technologies and solutions. The complexity of the new paradigm solutions continues to increase and CIOs need help in their IT-as-a-Service journey. Microland adopts a co-creation model to engage with enterprises, rather than being a conventional solution or service provider; Microland’s co-creation approach focuses on partnering with the customer, to jointly define business challenges, identify transformation opportunities and design and implement solutions that truly create the cloud enabled enterprise of tomorrow. The IT-as-a-Service paradigm is forcing us to innovate in many ways to deliver services, add new service lines to address the disruptive technologies and invest in areas such as automation. Increasingly, clients are expecting value-addition like predictive analytics for proactive fault prevention, as well as to achieve better governance and derive superior business value from IT.
Multi-sourcing:
The infrastructure space is dotted with multiple vendors supporting different towers or a single tower being serviced by multiple vendors. Infrastructure outsourcing was associated with proximity which need not necessarily be the most economical option. By virtue of hands-on trouble shooting nature of their delivery model and their proximity to the client, the local service providers acquired a certain standing in the market. The break-down of these traditional factors combined with reduction in bandwidth costs and clients’ evolving requirement for service management, proactive support & reporting have led to a rise in offshoring and a need for multiple providers.
The presence of multiple providers is not common to all infrastructure segments. We don’t see them in common applications or centrally delivered applications like email solutions, but when it comes to networking or certain other areas there are many service providers and technology partners who give specialised solutions. It is a safe bet to say that multi-vendor strategy will continue to exist in the infrastructure services space in the near to medium term.
In a multi-provider environment, the client expects the infrastructure service provider to play the role of services integrator who owns end-to-end SLA and provides vendor management. For one of our clients whose global network backbone is being managed by us, there are multiple telecom providers across the globe. We manage the vendor coordination and also provide vendor performance analysis while being responsible for the end-to-end network uptime. In such engagements, governance becomes critical. We have a robust governance framework wherein, we as integrators have monthly, quarterly & half yearly governance reviews with our client. Each of the reviews has a different objective ranging from operational & tactical to strategic. The half yearly reviews are at a strategic level where we exchange updates and strategic roadmaps & directions and review long term partnership & engagement initiatives.
Multi-sourcing will continue to evolve as services are getting aggregated and being measured at a higher level than before. For example, in a data centre, the three segments – server, storage, and database previously used to have CTO’s performance measurement at each of those levels. Multi-sourcing approach for server, storage or database was not only possible but also desirable. But today, all these three would come under a higher level of service offering and in such cases; a single vendor would make sense. So multi-sourcing will continue to evolve as per how the services are being delivered. Companies are moving more and more towards services management & reporting rather than managing IT at a device or element level.
The new eco-system:
The new ecosystem that we are seeing is of enterprises wanting to transform and adopt the new IT-as-a-Service paradigm (utility like services) - addressing physical, virtual and cloud enabled worlds. Customers expect innovation; expect vendors to co-create the cloud-enabled enterprise of tomorrow. The future state infrastructure as we see it will be a mix of traditional infrastructure, virtual infrastructure and public & private cloud environments. Services integration is becoming a critical success factor (CSF) in today’s multi-sourcing and cloud world. Service management and automation become mandatory in this new ecosystem of hybrid cloud infrastructure management, which drives productivity and reduces errors and lays emphasis on proactive service delivery.
With the enterprise adoption of virtualization and cloud technologies and increasing proliferation of self-service and provisioning tools, predictive analytics will play a key role in the areas of Capacity Management and Financial Management. Capacity Management will include business transaction forecasting, workload forecasting, static and dynamic sourcing from multiple cloud service providers. Financial Management will include cost per user per transaction, billing and chargeback. Innovation in the mentioned areas will be in addition to the predictive analytics role in the Fault Management aspects of traditional infrastructure.
In the new ecosystem, apart from “Operate” and “Manage” part, the “Build” part can be done remotely and can be automated too. The maturity displayed in the “Operate” and “Manage” part of the services has given customers the confidence and trust to use vendors in the “Build” areas like migrations, new architecture plans etc. Build is nowadays not being seen as just discrete projects but as an annuity standardized service. Even more so in the cloud era, specialised teams of architects and solution creators are getting involved with the customer at the build phase these days. When the scale is big, the providers avail the services of technology partners, product vendors, and data centre providers. They are all involved in the early stages like design & roll out where there is ample scope for more players. We are seeing a more active role for service providers such as us in the co-creation phase along with the customer. Post that, we play a services integrator and hybrid cloud management role.
A cloud assessment service would be handy for customers to gauge their maturity to move to cloud based services, a journey we call now2CloudSM. The architecting of the service happens after this assessment evaluation is done. All new IT Architectures today have a DR/ HA built in and are designed for failures. Thus backup of all the important data is already in-built, which is an advantage while moving to cloud based solutions for the enterprise.
The key players in the new eco-systems are:
We have identified our technology partners, service providers, and software solution providers with whom we intend to work in the future. The eco-system has shaped up in such a way that customers are demanding more specialisation and deeper expertise from the vendors. Customers expect the vendors to be able to work in a multi-vendor environment transparently. Ability to integrate traditional systems with virtual and cloud environment has become crucial. Ability to manage the hybrid environment - tools, platforms and processes, to manage physical, virtual and cloud resources, which will help in predictability, sustainability etc. at the right cost is vital.
Cloud adoption barriers:
In our view, the following are the barriers to cloud adoption:
Just as there are barriers, there are also factors that aid adoption of this new IT paradigm. The business leadership (board) is pushing the CIO in large enterprises to understand and adopt cloud to drive agility, flexibility, scalability. Adoption enables enterprises to shift part of what was until then CAPEX into OPEX. As part of any maturing process, client organisations’ expectations from IT organisations have grown. IT providers are now expected to help transform and grow business aggressively rather than being just a process enabler focused on cost savings.
We see ourselves helping organisations realize the benefits of the cloud paradigm by walking them through that path with the help of business value assessments & business cases, and assistance in not only migrating to this new hybrid environment but also integrating, managing and thriving in it.
Advantages or risks for global sourcing:
Customers have become information savvy by themselves and so their expectations from advisors and analysts have changed.
The way companies’ source will change due to the new ecosystem. Deals will not be large but will be small & specific, and companies will source directly from specialists for each of their requirements.
To summarise, the new ecosystem has created a level playing field for all service providers and made the infrastructure operations mainstream. We see the future enterprise IT environment to be hybrid – a mix of traditional, virtual and cloud enabled. The complexities of managing the IT operations in this scenario will only increase. Rapid advancement in technology and increased complexity is creating new opportunities for service providers to collaborate and co-create the cloud enabled enterprise of tomorrow. Innovation in areas such as automation & analytics will play a huge role.
In a multi-provider environment, the client expects the infrastructure service provider to play the role of services integrator who owns end-to-end SLA and provides vendor management. For one of our clients whose global network backbone is being managed by us, there are multiple telecom providers across the globe. We manage the vendor coordination and also provide vendor performance analysis while being responsible for the end-to-end network uptime. In such engagements, governance becomes critical. We have a robust governance framework wherein, we as integrators have monthly, quarterly & half yearly governance reviews with our client. Each of the reviews has a different objective ranging from operational & tactical to strategic. The half yearly reviews are at a strategic level where we exchange updates and strategic roadmaps & directions and review long term partnership & engagement initiatives.
Multi-sourcing will continue to evolve as services are getting aggregated and being measured at a higher level than before. For example, in a data centre, the three segments – server, storage, and database previously used to have CTO’s performance measurement at each of those levels. Multi-sourcing approach for server, storage or database was not only possible but also desirable. But today, all these three would come under a higher level of service offering and in such cases; a single vendor would make sense. So multi-sourcing will continue to evolve as per how the services are being delivered. Companies are moving more and more towards services management & reporting rather than managing IT at a device or element level.
The new eco-system:
The new ecosystem that we are seeing is of enterprises wanting to transform and adopt the new IT-as-a-Service paradigm (utility like services) - addressing physical, virtual and cloud enabled worlds. Customers expect innovation; expect vendors to co-create the cloud-enabled enterprise of tomorrow. The future state infrastructure as we see it will be a mix of traditional infrastructure, virtual infrastructure and public & private cloud environments. Services integration is becoming a critical success factor (CSF) in today’s multi-sourcing and cloud world. Service management and automation become mandatory in this new ecosystem of hybrid cloud infrastructure management, which drives productivity and reduces errors and lays emphasis on proactive service delivery.
With the enterprise adoption of virtualization and cloud technologies and increasing proliferation of self-service and provisioning tools, predictive analytics will play a key role in the areas of Capacity Management and Financial Management. Capacity Management will include business transaction forecasting, workload forecasting, static and dynamic sourcing from multiple cloud service providers. Financial Management will include cost per user per transaction, billing and chargeback. Innovation in the mentioned areas will be in addition to the predictive analytics role in the Fault Management aspects of traditional infrastructure.
In the new ecosystem, apart from “Operate” and “Manage” part, the “Build” part can be done remotely and can be automated too. The maturity displayed in the “Operate” and “Manage” part of the services has given customers the confidence and trust to use vendors in the “Build” areas like migrations, new architecture plans etc. Build is nowadays not being seen as just discrete projects but as an annuity standardized service. Even more so in the cloud era, specialised teams of architects and solution creators are getting involved with the customer at the build phase these days. When the scale is big, the providers avail the services of technology partners, product vendors, and data centre providers. They are all involved in the early stages like design & roll out where there is ample scope for more players. We are seeing a more active role for service providers such as us in the co-creation phase along with the customer. Post that, we play a services integrator and hybrid cloud management role.
A cloud assessment service would be handy for customers to gauge their maturity to move to cloud based services, a journey we call now2CloudSM. The architecting of the service happens after this assessment evaluation is done. All new IT Architectures today have a DR/ HA built in and are designed for failures. Thus backup of all the important data is already in-built, which is an advantage while moving to cloud based solutions for the enterprise.
The key players in the new eco-systems are:
- Cloud Service Providers - both data centres upgraded to cloud services providers and telecom service providers upgrading themselves to cloud services providers
- Cloud Services Integrators like Microland who help enterprises to integrate various pieces of infrastructure and services from cloud
- Automation & Cloud Platform Vendors including large companies & innovative start-ups
- Hardware & Software Vendors – the large technology & product companies
We have identified our technology partners, service providers, and software solution providers with whom we intend to work in the future. The eco-system has shaped up in such a way that customers are demanding more specialisation and deeper expertise from the vendors. Customers expect the vendors to be able to work in a multi-vendor environment transparently. Ability to integrate traditional systems with virtual and cloud environment has become crucial. Ability to manage the hybrid environment - tools, platforms and processes, to manage physical, virtual and cloud resources, which will help in predictability, sustainability etc. at the right cost is vital.
Cloud adoption barriers:
In our view, the following are the barriers to cloud adoption:
- Lack of awareness as to how to go about it and how it will benefit the organisation.
- Security and Data Privacy - Where will the data reside? Will the location bring in new challenges and risks with respect to legal and regulatory compliances?
- Vendor Lock-in - Client is concerned about the applications portability on cloud. Would this affect their chances of migrating to an alternate vendor/solution?
- End User Experience - Will cloud services provide similar end user experience to that of traditionally hosted applications? Will this need some kind of network upgrade?
- Governance & Management - Will the cloud provider offer end-to-end SLAs? Client is worried about the tools and skills required to manage this hybrid environment.
- Loss of Control possibly over applications and infrastructure.
Just as there are barriers, there are also factors that aid adoption of this new IT paradigm. The business leadership (board) is pushing the CIO in large enterprises to understand and adopt cloud to drive agility, flexibility, scalability. Adoption enables enterprises to shift part of what was until then CAPEX into OPEX. As part of any maturing process, client organisations’ expectations from IT organisations have grown. IT providers are now expected to help transform and grow business aggressively rather than being just a process enabler focused on cost savings.
We see ourselves helping organisations realize the benefits of the cloud paradigm by walking them through that path with the help of business value assessments & business cases, and assistance in not only migrating to this new hybrid environment but also integrating, managing and thriving in it.
Advantages or risks for global sourcing:
Customers have become information savvy by themselves and so their expectations from advisors and analysts have changed.
The way companies’ source will change due to the new ecosystem. Deals will not be large but will be small & specific, and companies will source directly from specialists for each of their requirements.
- Solutions will need to address and factor in business risks apart from the technology and operational risks – governance will become very critical
- Hardware players will be impacted in the IaaS cloud model where the brand power of hardware whittles down as solution becomes paramount. Software vendors will need to re-jig their delivery models. We see consolidation in both these industries
- Software-as-a-Service will lead to bundling of applications and infrastructure management and will be a threat to infrastructure services providers
- Traditional vendors who see themselves narrowly as IT infrastructure management providers (device & element management) are likely to be impacted
- The customers have newer needs and changing expectations and in line with this, providers are positioning themselves as IT services & management specialists
- Companies will implement a common IaaS layer and build different PaaS and SaaS services on top of this to cater to different business units and functions
- The business and functional leaders will gain greater say in directing IT spends than the CIOs in this new ecosystem
To summarise, the new ecosystem has created a level playing field for all service providers and made the infrastructure operations mainstream. We see the future enterprise IT environment to be hybrid – a mix of traditional, virtual and cloud enabled. The complexities of managing the IT operations in this scenario will only increase. Rapid advancement in technology and increased complexity is creating new opportunities for service providers to collaborate and co-create the cloud enabled enterprise of tomorrow. Innovation in areas such as automation & analytics will play a huge role.
