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(Sketch by R. Rajesh)

Dr Kishore S. Swaminathan

V.Rishi Kumar

Dr Kishore S. Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at the $20-billion Accenture, and his team in Chicago sit together every year to chart out the major technological changes. They then come out with key pointers to help their researchers define Accenture’s vision.

In an exclusive interaction with eWorld from the Chicago lab, Dr Swaminathan identified a few broad areas that, he feels, are poised to redefine the way enterprises look at data storage requirements.

Unlike a technology product company, which has a five-to-seven year product road map, Accenture looks at both products that impact the way the technology sector functions and also external factors that impact the technology. A tech vision is drawn up based on what other industry researchers and analysts are saying (secondary research), what all the other labs of product companies are researching, and how they are going to be over the next three-four years; where is the venture capital flowing; what some of the major research publications with seven-to-nine-year outlook are saying; “and we also look at the agenda of various technology conferences, which provide the most contextual or futuristic topic of interest,” he explains. Over to Dr Swaminathan:

Online companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are adding millions of consumers of their services and this has been very pronounced in the last 12 to 18 months. Social networking is also a major driver wherein rich user-generated content is being added every day, he says.

As a concept this may not seem to be new, as virtualisation has been there for several years. But if you look at the way retailing company Amazon has brought about a big change, this is poised for great acceleration, going forward, says Dr Swaminathan. From a book store, Amazon has transformed itself into a major hardware provider on demand.

To this, add the impact the new-generation Apple iPhone will have on enterprises. 3G phones will empower more workers to access information, on the move, from anywhere in the world, literally turning them into PCs.

For Cloud computing, there is no formal definition. “For us, it is the ability to source some capability from somewhere outside. You need not know and don’t know how and where this capability comes from,” he says.

The hardware cloud allows you to buy computing power and pay as you go, just as it is with Software as a Service (SaaS) where companies source software services and pay, depending upon use.

Then there is the desktop cloud where productivity applications, such as Word Processor and Spreadsheet, do not reside in the machine but are offered by someone such as Google. Another service provider named Zimbra, which was acquired by Yahoo, offered MS Office-like applications.

These things will change the way you look at the desk top and what operating system to have in your machine. Microsoft’s focus has been on having a large operating system offering all that an individual user requires. This model has been challenged by Linux, he says.

The problem of being on technology cloud is very few people actually know about it. But the reality is that it will have a big impact in the next three-five years. That is why Amazon, Microsoft and Google are helping people develop applications that can fit into the new era applications. The idea is to have development based on standards so that they fit into them without difficulty.

When new generation companies and start-ups look at offering services, they now need not create their own hardware and there won’t be any need to buy software. All they need to do is take the help of, say, Amazon or Google, who will provide all that is necessary to meet their business requirement. This will impact both software and hardware companies and also change the way companies and individuals do business using the Internet. The capital cost will also come down as hardware will not be purchased by small firms, and possibly even large ones, says Dr Swaminathan.

Few people actually know that Google is one of the world’s largest hardware designers, doing it all for itself, creating its own data farms to serve the world. Possibly it is amongst the top four-five hardware companies already after Dell, IBM, HP, he says.

Some may believe that cloud computing is for small companies. Contrary to this thinking, a good chunk of Fortune 50 companies are already using this, and many research projects in the life sciences are using Amazon hardware.

The New York Times had to convert over 140 years of its work into Adobe Acrobat PDF format. If it had to do so on its own, it would have taken years. Instead, it went in for virtual machines and converted all of it in 24 hours, at the cost of a few thousand dollars, he says. This is just an illustration of what hardware on demand could do, says Dr Swaminthan.

The other interesting shift is with regard to business process outsourcing (BPO) companies to stay competitive. They are innovating to offer platform-based services, that is do much with less. These platforms perform several tasks automatically in the areas of human resources, customer relationship management, among others.

Companies such as HP call hardware power on demand as Performance Driven Data Centre; IBM refers to this as Blue Cloud. There is also the line that there will only be a few large computing service providers. Given the regulatory issues and restrictions due to local legislations, information within a country cannot be passed outside. That means, they will need local service providers. So it will not be surprising to have a bank cloud or even a Government cloud, he says.

“At Accenture Labs, we help design solutions around these changes that will help these virtual machines to work more efficiently and also handle the variable costs of users,” Dr Swaminathan says.

This year, Accenture’s technology vision outlines some broad areas, including Cloud Computing, enhanced business intelligence capabilities, continuous access of content, to people, social computing, growth of user-generated content and Green computing.

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